


The Terminal

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [29]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Ableism, Bigotry, Child Abuse, Eugenics, Fascism, Racism, Slavery, anti-Semitism, pro-fascism, pro-slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 07:44:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16445684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: CONTENT WARNING: BIGOTRY, FASCIST RHETORIC(Details in Notes)The Animorphs have a lot going on. With the fight for human unification and world peace on one hand , the fight against alien invaders on the other, and just trying to grow up to be decent citizens of the Empire in the middle, there's not much room for anything to go wrong. But if Ax's information is correct, the yeerks are upping their game. They're expanding into new bases outside the city.The Animorphs can't allow this. Ready to protect their planet from invaders, they head to Clearview Orphanage, the new yeerk base of operations and Tobias' old home. But Jake knows something about Clearview, too, and what they find might tear the Animorphs apart before the yeerks can.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We're doing the Elfangor's Secret Evil Alt Universe and it's... it's a lot, you guys. We're talking multiple brands of racism, including anti-semitism, pro-eugenics, pro-slavery, normalised slavery, child abuse and forced family separation, and a metric fuckton of ableism. Reading this will give a more thorough experience re: long-term character development and soforth, but you won't miss any major plot points if you skip it, because I'll put a summary at the start of the next book.

I am called Cassie.

I won’t tell you my last name. You don’t need it. I don’t like people looking up my ability files and compliance histories without my permission, so if it’s that important to you, do your own detective work.

It was on a Saturday that the chaos started. I’d been running down the stocklist in the Wildlife Stability Center that my family runs out of our barn and noted that the antibiotics were running strangely low. I’d triple-checked my numbers, and we should definitely have had two more packets of pills than we did. Unless Dad had misreported a patient dosage or not recorded wastage, that meant theft. And there weren’t too many candidates for that; the only people who ever came in my barn were the Animorphs, my family, and the slaves. If the Animorphs had needed drugs off the hospital records (and I don’t know why they would need antibiotics), they would have come to me. And we only had two slaves.

I glanced over at September Twelve, who was scrubbing out a cage. Her eyes were on her task and, being deaf, she couldn’t hear me when I stopped working, so she didn’t notice my gaze. She was in and out of the barn the most often and had a lot more opportunity to steal than October Nine, but we’d had September for almost ten years and she knew better than to pull such tricks. October, being barely seven and in the household for a couple of months, must have snuck in and stole them to trade for illegal drugs or something. Younger slaves did that sort of thing all the time, I’d heard.

I noted the discrepancy for my father to deal with. I could hear a car approaching. I tapped September on the shoulder, causing her to jump, and waited until her eyes were on my lips.

“You can go now,” I told her, careful to enunciate clearly.

“Yes, Mistress,” she slurred in the creepy not-quite-English of the deaf, before scampering off. I glanced at the cage she’d been cleaning and made a mental note to finish it myself after the meeting. My parents might rethink my use of the Center as a meeting place for our ‘biology club’ if our presence caused them any actual inconvenience, and I didn’t want the Animorphs near our slaves any more than could be helped – no matter how many times I told them, the other Animorphs persisted in acting as if the slaves were stupid. September had tested normally for intelligence and been registered because she was deaf, which was one of the reasons my parents had picked her; you needed brains to work in the Stability Center. October had been below the intelligence cutoff, but even he was capable of seeing and hearing and telling tales.

The car pulled up outside the barn. I checked that the barn was free of family as Melissa strode in, one hand wrapped around the lead of her huge doberman. Technically she had three, as befitted the only child of Overseer Chapman, but only one needed to come to our meetings. I gave them both a nod.

“Melissa,” I said. “Tobias.”

Melissa fluttered her fingers in a little wave and sat in my father’s office chair. Tobias sat next to her and rested his head in her lap. She petted him idly.

Melissa and I had been good friends for years. I know, it sounds crazy – the daughter of Overseer Chapman himself, and a black wildlife preservationist who couldn’t get her grades above a Class Two? I didn’t even know what Melissa’s grades were. Her family was so highly ranked that her grade files and ability test files were locked. But I bet they were amazing – she came from too good stock for them not to be.

But that’s the thing – Melissa, like me, didn’t care about status. Neither of us played those stupid political games about what people you should befriend to get good apprenticeships and look good on your records later in life. Her family were basically local royalty, and mine owned our own small business in a government-protected field. Oh, she had tons of privileges that I didn’t – Melissa was allowed to drive, whereas I wouldn’t be allowed to take my test until I was twenty one (because blacks mature too slowly to operate complicated devices as young as whites), and she could say pretty much anything and it’d be laughed off, because the daughter of the Overseer was obviously not going to be a radical, whereas blacks like me were inherently predisposed to overreaction and radical behaviour so I had to be a lot more careful about my image. It went the other way, too; I could go pretty much anywhere I wanted without dogs or guards or schedules, and Melissa was expected to perform perfectly at every task in Youth Group because of her natural advantages, whereas I could be lazier about things. But none of that mattered to us. We were both hardcore Diversitists, and brushed off all that like-attracts-like garbage about who we were supposed to be and what we were supposed to do.

Melissa and Tobias were harder to work out. They’d latched onto each other the very first week they’d met, right there in the construction site where we met Elfangor, and there was real, genuine affection between them. I’d never brought it up, but I’d always kind of suspected that Tobias had gotten himself stuck in morph as a Doberman on purpose, so that he could be with her. It was a move I approved of. Even though he couldn’t morph now, he was more useful guarding her than having to sneak out of the adoption center if he wanted to do anything.

I wondered vaguely what Overseer Chapman would say if he knew about Tobias. He tolerated me because he liked me and alliances with a Wildlife Stability Center looked good in a Diversitist government, but an adoption agency runaway who was almost certainly destined for slavery or a military draft when he turned sixteen? That would be a different story.

“Is the Supreme here yet?” Melissa asked.

I shook my head. “Ax isn’t even here yet.”

“I guess we are early then, huh.”

“Ten whole minutes. You marched in to save poor benighted me from a ten-minute eternity of stocktaking and job management.”

Melissa laughed. She opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off when Ax walked in. He was a little unsteady on human feet, picking his way across the barn floor to sit on the bench lined along the wall where we used to keep the hay, back when the deer were worth our time to heal. He stared at the open bag of sweets I’d left on the desk, but knew better than to move. When Ax had first morphed human, he’d started to develop all kinds of contrasocial habits including trying to eat everything in sight, and it had taken firm discipline to break him of them.

I gave him a nod. He nodded back. You couldn’t really have a conversation with Ax. He was an uncouth alien who we were kind of forced to keep on-planet to help us fight the more dangerous aliens, but he’d never really be welcome. To him, we were dimwitted primitives, which was an irony and a half. The only thing to discuss was matters related to the fight, and it’d be very disrespectful to do that before Supreme Jake arrived. So I ignored him, and grinned at Melissa instead. “Did you hear what Derek was saying the other day about the radio?”

“What about it?”

“They’re looking at opening up a third station.”

Her eyes widened. “Why?”

“It’s a school station! We’d have political, social, and school. Run by Youth Group; kids talking to kids. I think it could be big.”

“Big? How? It’s a radio station. People aren’t going to be more interested in listening to government decrees just because they’re given by a kid.”

“No, but it’s good training for the kids. See? It’s an integration thing. Because of Brazil, I think.”

“Because of – oh!” Melissa nodded. “Because of those new Primitive kids they’re trying to integrate? I still don’t think dumping them in our school system is the best idea.” She wrinkled her nose. “Who wants to learn math with a bunch of jungle rats?”

“No, see, that’s the point. It’ll help show them how we live in civilised places, and learn to speak English properly instead of that jungle jabber they’re so incessant with. I agree, it’s stupid to put them in school – it means we’re sacrificing our education just because they can’t work through the system like everyone else. They should’ve gone into one of the adoption centers like other orphans and been adopted from there, where they’d be fair and square with other orphans, instead of being given special treatment over our own Civilized kids.” I glanced at Tobias.

“Exactly!” Melissa exclaimed. “That’s, what, six Civilised orphans that could’ve had families of their own being set back by queue-jumping Brazillians! So why do you think it’s a good thing?”

“Well, our army did make them orphans in the first place. But more to the point, I think the experiment has to be done. If they integrate better this way, or integrate worse, that’s valuable data. If this radio station helps them, and if it helps other kids who are having trouble, that’s valuable data. The more efficiently we can separate the wheat from the chaff, the faster we can finish civilizing the world and have world peace. It’s all about peace, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “But we’re perpetuating other problems if we risk infecting our population with weaknesses by lax integration. Is it worth it? We’re basically letting six mud-hut-born dead-ends gobble up resources that should be going to people who deserve them and can use them better.”

“They passed health and ability testing.”

“They’re Brazillian! The standards for their test haven’t been properly set yet! We know they don’t have cystic fibrosis or polio or whatever, but they could have any kind of weird foreign weakness we’ve never heard of!”

“Polio isn’t heritable,” I pointed out. “It’s a virus.”

“Whatever!”

“And by that logic,” I said, “they might turn out to be geniuses. That’d be pretty cool, right?”

Melissa rolled her eyes. “I won’t hold my breath. If Brazil had enough geniuses to make that likely, they wouldn’t be losing the war so badly.”

I laughed. “Hard to argue with that. Point is: third radio station, and if it’s going to be run by kids, they might actually play some decent music.”

“Oh my god, we should start an Animorphs band. Send coded messages about the yeerk invasion.”

“Supreme Jake would kill us.”

“Nah, he’d be lead guitar.”

“Not lead singer?”

Melissa snorted. “With his voice? Can you imagine him singing? But those fingers on a guitar, man. Those soulful eyes.” She clenched her hands dramatically over her heart. “We’d get every girl in the school listening on his heartthrob status alone.”

It was my turn to roll my eyes. Melissa had never been shy about mocking Jake’s good looks, even back before we were Animorphs. I think she’d started it to annoy Marco while they were dating. They’d broken up shortly before we met Elfangor (I think they’d only been dating to annoy each of their parents), and then there’d been Tobias, but the joking about Jake’s looks had stuck.

I couldn’t disagree; Jake was pretty cute. We were sort of lucky, I supposed, that none of the Animorphs were real romantic prospects for each other, so we didn’t have to worry about dissolving into teen drama. Melissa and Tobias cared a lot about each other, but that wasn’t going anywhere until we figured out how to turn Tobias back into a boy. Neither of them would give up, though, which meant that Melissa wouldn’t date anyone. As for me, well, I had to contend with the awkward fact that both of the Animorph boys were half-castes and neither half was black. Jake’s father was Jewish; Marco’s mother was Mexican. I wasn’t matching myself up with a half-caste.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m the furthest thing from a Purist. My family runs the Wildlife Stability Center, for Christ’s sake; we’re about as hardcore Diversitist as you can get. I know about the importance of biological diversity; I firmly believe that to whittle down the human species to a single race like those Purist idiots want results not in a Strong, Perfect People, but in the weakness of homogeneity that, like a wheat crop, can all be destroyed in a single disaster. All of the races have their strengths and weaknesses, and a strong, bright future for humanity means that we all need to be there to support each other with our strengths, to curtail each others’ weaknesses. And yes, that includes race mixing. The mule is in many ways superior to both the horse and the donkey. The mutt is often stronger than the purebred.

But you had to go slowly. Mixing two races was fine, but beyond that we just didn’t have the data yet to know if it was a good idea with current humans. One day, in a hundred generations’ time, when the world was fully civilized and peaceful and the heritable weaknesses from all of its people had quietly died out, when our science had improved to the point where we understood any inherent dangers and weaknesses in crossbreeding, then all of humanity would merge into a singular ultimate race with no need to document or regulate anyone or anything, and then we’d reach up into the stars. But we weren’t there yet, and doing too much race mixing just risked infecting the different races with each others’ weaknesses. Marco already had too much Caucasian apathy and Mexican laziness, and that was just one cross. If he married a white girl, and their kids married another white person, their grandfather’s heritage could be forgotten and they might carry that laziness on to infect the general white population. See the problem? If he married a black girl like me, the chaos would only get worse.

Anyway, point is, none of the Animorphs were really compatible relationship-wise, at least not until we solved Tobias’ problem. That meant no courtship drama, which was fine by me. We were supposed to be an army, not a social club.

Jake and Marco arrived exactly on time. We all stood to salute Supreme Jake, and Marco slipped in directly behind him and made a big silent pantomime like he was overcome with emotion because we were saluting him. Jake pretended not to notice.

“Reports,” Jake said, while we sat down.

“No activity on the local government front,” Melissa reported. “The yeerks are slipping a couple more social programs into Youth Group, using my father to push them through accreditation quickly, but nothing to worry about.”

Jake narrowed his eyes slightly. “I’ll be the judge of that. What programs?”

“Some new music program and a fitness program for the ten-to-twelves. The fitness program is designed to be implemented and then phased into the schools next year and get the yeerks more of a foothold for recruiting younger hosts. I don’t know the purpose of the music program.”

Jake nodded. “Anything else?”

“Not in local government.”

“Okay. Cassie?”

“The Sharing is chugging along at its usual rate,” I said. “Six new kids came through my unit last week, and two ‘graduated’ to ‘full membership’. I’ll get their names for you.”

“Are they pressuring you any worse?”

“No, they’re still buying my line about wanting to stay at the level I am to help other kids.” I hesitated before adding, “You should know, Jake, that one of the new kids this week was your cousin.”

An intake of breath. Then Jake said, “Which one?”

“Jordan, obviously. Sara’s still too young to join.” I was vaguely aware that Jake had a second group of cousins, but they lived somewhere far away. I’d never met them.

“How long before – ?”

“They have to be in the group for at least two months before they’re allowed to move on to full membership.”

“It used to be like three sessions when I went,” Melissa said, frowning.

I nodded. “I suggested the imposed minimum time a little while back. It slows the infestation rate, which is what we want, but increases the voluntary rate, which is what they want. It’s a psychological trick – humans like something more if it’s harder to obtain.”

“Even if that thing is losing their freedom to brainslugs?” Marco asked doubtfully.

“The yeerks use other tricks as well, but yes, it still helps.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“There was a shootout near the end of my street last night,” Marco reported. “I can’t be sure it was yeerk, but I recognised at least seven of the police as controllers.”

“So?” I asked. “There are tons of police controllers.”

“These guys were from two districts over.”

Jake nodded. “That is weird. Any idea what the bust was?”

“Not sure; they put blinders up. I tend to assume drugs, but I overheard some chatter and it might be radicals. Either way, there were six arrestees and no body bags.”

That got our attention.

“Nobody was killed?” Melissa asked. “ _No-one_?”

“They put a lot of effort into taking them alive,” Marco confirmed.

We took a few seconds to think this through. Drugs or radicals didn’t matter; that was contrasocial behaviour, the punishment for which would be reeducation. And the reeducation camps were deeply infested with yeerks. They had their gooey little slug selves all through those places – subversive troublemaker walks in, undergoes a few months of therapy, orderly citizen walks out. The system works. At least, looks like it does if you don’t know the alien infestation part.

“Could be nothing,” I said, without believing it. “It could just be a coincidence. Some controllers had just been transferred to another department, and those people just happened to be easy to arrest.”

“Could be,” Marco said doubtfully. “But I know that family. They’ve been on our street for a long time. They’re scientists; they work with Dad.”

“Physicists,” I said, trying not to sound derisive. It wasn’t Marco’s fault that his Dad’s work was barely science. It was almost _math_ , for Christ’s sake; barely any actual scientific investigation at all.

“They’re more like… I don’t know how to describe it. They’re working on something that, well, they explained it to me like a thinking telegram.”

“A what?”

“You know telegraphs? Like from before telephones? How you can send messages using an on-off kind of code?” He tapped S-O-S on the bench to demonstrate. “They say they can send binary codes through machines and turn them into other binary codes so that it’s a bit like the machine is thinking.”

We stared.

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either,” Marco agreed. “But they’ve got ones that do math really, really quickly. Like add up whole pages of numbers, calculate times and distances and stuff, in a second. They’re already implementing them in the army to help track troop movements and resources, and they’re trying to teach the machines to break codes.”

“Ax,” Jake said, “is that possible?”

“Yes, Supreme Jake,” Ax said. “All andalite and yeerk ships use such technology. Rather more advanced than the simple things that Marco describes, but – ”

“Yes, yes, your alien society is so advanced,” Marco muttered.

Jake silenced both of them with a look. “Okay,” he said. “So we might have a problem.”

“If the yeerks already have advanced versions, why do they want this family?” I asked.

Marco shrugged. “Maybe they don’t want humans having such advanced tech?”

Nobody except me was watching Ax, so nobody else saw him screw up his entire face trying not to laugh. I bit my lip. “The fact that they’re using the police to target particular hosts is concerning regardless of why they want these ones, I suppose,” I said.

“They were going to hit on the idea eventually,” Melissa shrugged. “It’s a pretty obvious tactic. Yeerks might be stupid, but even slaves would be trying this by now.”

“It might be a good thing, even,” I said. “If we could find a way to keep track of their arrests, we’d have more information on their plans.”

“We seriously need an in with the police,” Marco agreed. He looked at Jake.

Jake sighed, frustrated. “For the last time, I am not joining the Junior Police. You join the Junior Police.”

“I can’t, remember? You need at least three generations civilized to join law enforcement, even just junior law enforcement through Youth Group, and my mom’s first generation. Cassie’s on the environmentalist track and we need her access to the barn, Melissa needs to keep spying on her parents and her dad would kill her if she tanked her career by taking such a low-status apprenticeship, and Tobias and Ax don’t legally exist.”

“And I’m not derailing my career for the sake of literal slugs,” Jake said, crossing his arms. “I’m military.”

“Why fight space slugs when you can slaughter jungle rats?” I quipped. “It’d be such a pity if any Primitives escaped alive because you weren’t there to deal with them.”

Jake gave me a sharp look, and exchanged what he probably thought to be a subtle glance with Marco. I knew what they were thinking. Jake was wondering if I was a radical. It was something I was used to; my people were predisposed to rushes of judgement, emotional outbursts and radical behaviour, so if someone like me disapproved of Empire policy, people’s minds immediately went to the third failing. My parents had taught me from a young age to be more careful about what I said, but I generally didn’t bother with the Animorphs, because they couldn’t report me no matter what I thought; it’d mark me for potential reeducation, which would just be handing the Animorphs to the yeerks on a silver platter.

Still, I felt a rush of fury at Jake’s look. From someone like Melissa or Marco it would be understandable, but Jewish people had just as strong radical tendencies as black people, and they were sneaky about it. My people had been civilized for two generations longer than Jake’s – it was the war with my people that had started the World Peace Project in the first place! Who did he think he was?!

I didn’t let my feelings show on my face. I just smiled blandly at him, and after a moment, he said, “Anything else, Marco?”

“No,” Marco said. “That’s it.”

Jake nodded and looked at Tobias. This was protocol more than anything; Tobias was ranked next, but he saw very little of interest that Melissa didn’t see, so almost never had anything to report.

<Nothing to report,> he said, as usual.

“Ax?” Jake asked.

“My scouting has revealed the movement of suspicious substances throughout the city,” Ax said, careful to enunciate clearly. “This includes the byproducts of industrial processes that humans usually dump, and that if mixed with certain extraterrestrial products could – ”

“Get to the point,” Jake said.

“Yes, Supreme Jake. I believe that the yeerks may be building a Kandrona in the city.”

“In the city?” Melissa asked, frowning. “Not in space? Why?”

“I do not know. The only reason I can think of is that it might be hard to transport from space.”

“That’s never been a problem before,” Marco said. “We’ve busted two of those things and they’re, what, the size of cars?”

“A much larger one would cover a much larger area,” Ax said. “And after losing two, it is probable that they want to put one somewhere more difficult to access.”

“You think they’re building one in the Yeerk Pool itself,” I said.

Marco shook his head. “No, we’ve shown that we can bust in and out of there when we have to. And why would that need to be big? We already know that the Kandrona can shine through solid rock, right, because the others were aboveground. So...”

“So?”

“So, you build a massive one underground somewhere else, not in the Yeerk Pool, somewhere that nobody goes in and out of except the occasional tech, so you can lock it up tight and we’d never find it. Somewhere where it’s juuust close enough to reach the Yeerk Pool, well away from where we operate. Then you can build as many Pools as you want in that radius.” He looked around at all of us, staring, and shrugged. “At least, that’s what I would do.”

“That is, I believe, the plan,” Ax confirmed. “They are amassing chemicals at such a site, with a large underground complex.”

“Where?”

“The Clearview Adoption Center.”

The blood left Jake’s face. “Did you say – ”

<Clearview?> Tobias cut him off. <In that little village about two hours North?>

Jake glared at him.

“Is that where you’re from?” Melissa asked him.

<I’m from a few, but yeah, that’s where I escaped. Crawled into the luggage compartment of a bus to get to the city. Not a fun ride. Anyway, I know the place.>

Jake frowned at Tobias, but glanced up at Melissa and decided against reprimanding him for his disrespect. Jake had always been careful around Melissa, although he seemed to think he was subtle enough that nobody noticed. Everyone always thought things like that, so wrapped up in their own heads; they thought that because they didn’t pay attention to other people, other people wouldn’t pay attention to them. Jake wore his insecurity on his sleeve. He was Supreme Leader because Tobias, who hadn’t known any of our backgrounds when he’d met us in the construction site, had nominated him, and everyone had run with it. Melissa hadn’t challenged him; at first, we’d all thought it was just because she was clearly besotted with Tobias, but she’d cheerfully accepted him as leader for the entire history of the Animorphs. It was obvious to me that it annoyed him, made him nervous. I understood, because I knew Melissa – she was assured of herself, assured of her own future, and she didn’t need to squabble in petty status games with an upstart general in our guerrilla war side project. She’d be too busy for the job anyway, and Jake had proven himself to be exceptionally good at it, so why try to take it from him?

Several times, I’d considered straightening things out, explaining to Jake that Melissa didn’t want his job and wouldn’t try to pull rank on him if he treated her like he treated the rest of us, but I always decided against it. The insecurity made him constantly want to prove himself and strive to be the best leader he could possibly be. It made him a better leader, so I let it continue.

“Okay,” Jake said. “Tomorrow’s our free day. I guess we’re going to Clearview.”

  


	2. Chapter 2

The Animorphs left, and I made sure to finish September’s barn jobs before heading inside. October had just about finished cooking dinner when I breezed through; he put down a wooden spoon long enough to give me a quick bow, which I ignored. I found my father in his office.

“Hiya, compass,” Dad greeted me with a smile. As usual, his office was covered in piles of paper that, to me, looked very disorganised. There were pen marks on his cheek, somehow.

I gave him a quick hug. “Hello, sir.”

“Your teacher called. She said you aced your last emotional intelligence exam. Well done.” He beamed with pride.

I merely nodded politely. Of course I’d aced my last EQ test. I always aced my EQ tests. They really weren’t that hard. The averages kept being dragged down by people who couldn’t read a facial expression to save their own lives, which meant that all you had to do was pay the slightest attention to other human beings and they treated you like some kind of prodigy.

His pride was kind of irritating. It spoke of a lack of faith in me, like he assumed I should be incompetent and was pleasantly surprised. I’d prefer if he did what he used to do – expect the best of me because he knew I could do the best, and only comment if I needed correction.

I loved him, though, so I put up with his babying. “Melissa wants to hang out tomorrow,” I explained. “If that’s okay?”

“Are those boys going to be there?” Dad asked, trying to sound casual.

I shrugged. “I’m not their Supreme. They can go where they want.”

“Fine.”

“So I can go?”

“Unless your mother says otherwise, you can go.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you completed your homework?”

“I was just about to.”

“Okay, love. Just make sure to get it done. Do us proud.”

There it was again. ‘Do us proud’, like it was something I was stupid enough to need to be reminded to do. I just nodded and handed him my stocktake report. “Some antibiotics are missing,” I said.

He clicked his tongue in irritation. “Again?”

I shrugged. “And I promised I’d help the school build that new classroom on Wednesday, is that okay?”

“Sure, compass.” He went back to his papers. I watched him carefully. Was there an alien in that brain, controlling his movements and words? Just pretending to be a loving father, a devoted conservationalist, so that it could co-opt humanity’s future to serve a bunch of disgusting alien slugs?

War didn’t come easily to my family. Jake had an aunt who had died on the front lines and an uncle that still fought on them, Melissa had a decorated family line in times of peace and war, and even Marco’s father was a military engineer. But the farmland bordering the Conservation Zone had been in my family since the Civil Accords were signed, and we had plonked ourselves on it and devoted ourselves to making a home for the Empire ever since. For my great-grandparents, that meant farming. For my grandparents and parent, it meant renting out our farmland and devoting their time to preserving the biodiversity of the Conservation Zone. Which made me, I supposed, the first soldier in the family. In the most high-stakes war ever.

   


	3. Chapter 3

We took the bus.

Well, Melissa took the bus with her three dobermans (Tobias, Ax and me) and her two bodyguards (Jake and Marco in adult morphs). The decision on roles had been pretty straightforward, as Ax made a terrible human, and Jake and Marco were both better marksmen than me. I’d almost had to do remedial marksmanship for Youth Group, that’s how bad I was. They’d even tested my eyesight. Do you know what it’s like to be thirteen, secure future with a family apprenticeship all lined up ahead of you, high-ranking friends and Class Two grades, and suddenly find yourself being tested for a disability that, if it were severe enough, could mark you for enslavement? I knew I met the minimum citizenship requirements for eyesight because I could read just fine, but it had still been the most terrifying week of my life. I still hated handling guns because of it.

The trip was pretty relaxing, actually. We could have driven in Melissa’s car, but government cars are logged at checkpoints. A young woman with two bodyguards and three dogs is a bit unusual on public transport, but not logged; girls like Melissa took public transport all the time to at least pretend to have a bit of freedom from their parents.

Besides, there was no reason to all cram into a car if we didn’t have to. The bus toilet was big enough to demorph in, and Ax could keep perfect time, so we had no real issues on the way to Clearview. The center itself was only a short walk from the bus stop – I suspected that the town had actually sprung up around the center as somewhere for workers and their families to live.

The center itself looked just like adoption centers on TV – large concrete buildings separated by perfectly manicured lawns divided by white stone paths. The paths were lined with artful trees and bushes, most of which were trimmed into their traditional square hedges or carrot-shaped column trees, but the ones around the playground were trimmed into animal shapes. I didn’t get a good look, because while the outer fence was simple chainlink all the way to the ground, the electrified fence behind it had a concrete base that was slightly higher than doberman head height.

The gates worked in what Ax described as an “airlock” pattern – there were three of them with enough space between to fit a cargo van, and no two consecutive gates could be opened at once. Melissa handed her ID card to the guy at the gate, who inspected it for the usual markers. He was about our age, so probably here on apprenticeship; the fact that he was trusted to do guard duty alone said a lot in his favour. He flashed her a dazzling smile. “You’ve come a long way, Miss Chapman. Looking for a little brother or sister?”

Melissa smiled back and tossed her hair. “School project, you know. We’re doing an awareness campaign for these poor orphans looking for good, honorable patriots to adopt them.” She indicated the bulky camera around her neck.

“You know that about four-fifths of these kids are blacklisted, right?” the guard asked, handing the ID back along with a day pass. “That means – ”

“Oh, that’s okay. We just won’t photograph those.”

Jake and Marco handed over their borrowed IDs for inspection, which were barely glanced at. People rarely checked bodyguard Ids if their employers checked out. He pushed a button, and the first gate rattled open.

“Did he seriously think you might not know there were blacklisted kids here?” Marco asked.

<Did he seriously think you might not know what ‘blacklisted’ means?> Tobias asked.

“It’s normal,” she said just loud enough for the group to hear. “Boys like explaining things to girls. It makes them feel smarter.”

<Four in five sounds like a high number,> I commented.

<No, it’s right,> Tobias said. <I had whole classes full of kids that weren’t eligible for adoption when I was here.>

“It’s barbaric, putting them with perfectly normal kids,” Melissa muttered.

<Why? Most of us are headed to the same fate.>

“Most of _them_. You got out.”

<Ha, sure. Point is, we can test for so many diseases now. It’s not just your senses and coordination and intelligence; we can predict the risk of all kinds of lung and heart and bone diseases in little kids who don’t show symptoms yet. There are so many ways someone can fail a test before their abilities are even tested, and the ability ceiling keeps being raised as the population increases, so you get more kids failing the citizenship ability tests. Did you know that you have to score at least a ninety eight on the IQ test now?>

“Why are they raising the ability ceilings?” Jake asked.

<Because there are more kids. They can afford to be choosier.>

“So more good Empire kids are missing out because we’re bringing in savages?” Marco asked, sounding angry.

<That’s a good thing, Marco,> I said.

“How can that possibly be a good thing?”

I sighed mentally. This was the problem with people like the other Animorphs; they didn’t think globally. <Because when they come here, they’re Empire kids as much as you or me. Just like your mom. The tests aren’t about where people came from; it’s about what they can contribute. When you’re trying to filter a population, your standards are limited by what you have available; we need enough people with enough diversity to keep a strong population going, and to be sure that population has lots of different kinds of strength. But when we have more people, we can afford to be a lot choosier. This means we can improve the human race in fewer generations, and attain a perfect future much faster.>

“And those poor Empire kids who are gonna be slaves because of it?”

<They lost a basic competency competition to jungle rats. They deserve it.>

Marco didn’t have anything to say to that. The third gate was opening, anyway, and we had to focus our attention back on our mission – find out if this Kandrona was being built, and where.

<Okay,> Jake said, switching to thoughtspeak now that we were moving into an area we might be overheard, <we all know what we’re doing. Tobias, we went through the trouble of doing this main gate thing instead of just flying in so that we could bring you, so pull your weight. You know the layout of this place. Melissa, stay with Tobias and use your school project excuse to get around; everyone else, we’re morphing small the first chance we get so that we can move around more freely, and hitching a ride on Melissa. Tobias, we’re looking for big basements and so forth. Might be aboveground, but I doubt it.>

The Center was immaculately kept; the broad stone paths and perfect lawns didn’t have a single piece of trash on them. From a distance, my dog eyes couldn’t make out the steel mesh on the windows, so they looked wide and inviting, kind of like school. There were even some ornate wrought-iron fountains.

<That little building to our right is admin,> Tobias informed us. <Nobody will notice if you walk right past. That huge one straight ahead is the main education complex, and to the left and right of it are the boys’ and girls’ dorms. Behind those are the factory training centers, where the kids make clothes and wallets and stuff to finance the institution.>

I nodded my little doggy head. It hadn’t occurred to me that the kids here would miss out on apprenticeships if they got too old without being adopted, so training them in a career was a good idea. And it would give the slaves a higher sale value if they had factory skills. I’d always been kind of bothered by these sorts of institutions, but between the beautiful grounds, the large playground and the job training, I was realising that they actually were quite compassionate places.

<Behind the complex is a large hedge maze, unless they’ve taken it down. And behind that the security buildings.>

“Why would they take the maze down?” Marco asked, very quietly.

“You used it in your escape, didn’t you?” Melissa mumbled to Tobias.

<Hell yeah. There were five of us, and we knew every corner of that thing. We got about half the guards lost in it and then made the dash for the back gates. I think I might be the only one who actually made it. Supreme Jake, if the maze is still there, it’s probably a good place to morph small.>

“Agreed,” Jake said.

Tobias led us between the education center and the boys’ dorm, around the back. Up close, it was easier to see the steel mesh on the windows and the heavy doors, all closed. We didn’t try to enter either building, so the guards posted on every door didn’t stop us; Melissa waved cheerfully at them and Jake and Marco, as per protocol, ignored them.

The hedge maze was still there, and Tobias easily led us to a part not viewable by any guards or cameras where we could demorph safely. This wasn’t hard, as the entire center only had about five cameras and had to reuse the tapes every 24 hours, so the only reason we’d ever be seen on any of them at all was if we did something attention-grabbing enough to get someone to review the footage. I hoped that didn’t happen – Melissa showing up in suspicious areas wasn’t ideal – but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if it did.

Once I was fully green anole, I climbed up Melissa’s arm to settle on her right shoulder, under her scarf. Ax was next to me. Jake and Marco would be on the left.

<Okay, Tobias,> Jake said. <Targets?>

<The two biggest underground areas would be under the kitchen and shirt factory to the East, which is used for storage, or under the main education complex. The storage basement would be easier to get in and out of.>

<Okay, then. Melissa, get us into the education complex, close enough to a basement entrance to drop off Cassie, Marco and Ax. Then the three of us will head to the storage under the kitchen. Ax, time?>

<We have been in morph for three minutes.>

<Let’s go then.>


	4. Chapter 4

We left the maze, and Melissa jogged up to the nearest guard on an education complex door. “Hi!” she said brightly, fluttering her fingers in a wave. “My name’s Melissa Chapman. I’m here to do a school project to encourage adoption of our great Empire’s orphans,” she explained, indicating the camera around her neck, “and I was wondering if I could maybe interview and photograph some of them?”

The guard, a grey-haired man who looked about fifty and whose hand hadn’t left the taser on his belt since she’d approached him, looked her up and down. “You check in at reception?”

“Oh, was I supposed to? I’m so sorry. I just spoke to the guard on the gate and he gave me this...” She waved the pass.

The guard snorted. “’Course he did. Idiot kid.” He inspected the pass, along with her ID. “Well that’s his job on the line, not mine. The kiddies are in class right now. I’ll get you a guide so you don’t disturb anyone.”

“Oh, thank you so much!” Melissa reached out and brushed the man’s hand with her own. This wasn’t a mere flirty gesture; I saw the guard’s eyelids flutter as she acquired him, just in case. A second later, he shook himself out of the trance and barked some short orders into his radio.

“Won’t be a minute,” he said, clipping the radio back onto his belt and returning his hand to its habitual position on his taser.

It was, in fact, almost exactly a minute of uncomfortable silence before a young boy jogged over. He wasn’t wearing a guard uniform, so I assumed he was probably a resident. He was in fact dressed, somewhat bizarrely, in the height of boys’ fashion; a cheekily short-sleeved blazer over a salmon pink shirt tucked into pants so billowy they were almost pantaloons. His red hair was trimmed short, and he looked well-fed enough. He greeted Melissa with a bright smile. “Hey.”

“Harold, help the girl get what she wants. Don’t let her get in anyone’s way.”

“Yes, sir.”

The guard opened the door for us and stepped aside.

The door opened directly into a hall, which I expected. It was lined with doors and large windows, allowing us to see inside the classrooms. In them, children sat in class sizes of about twenty, listening to teachers lecture or copying things off the board. It looked rather a lot like my school, except that the kids were somehow a lot more fashionably dressed. It took me a moment to realise why – they were probably issued clothes made in their on-site factory.

“My name’s Melissa,” Melissa said as our group made its way down the hall.

“Harold. But you know that, I guess.” He blushed.

“Can I interview you for my project, Harold?”

“Oh, sure. I mean, if you want. There’s not much to tell, though. My dad died in the war – he was a volunteer, not a draftee – and then my mom caught pneumonia the next year. I didn’t have any other family, so...” he shrugged.

“Then I definitely have to interview you! You’re a perfect candidate for adoption!”

“Nah, I’m too old.”

“What do you mean, too old?”

“Families only want little kids. They’re cuter, I guess, and maybe people think they can integrate them into their families better. When you get to my age, especially if you’ve been in a place like this for a few years, you get so far behind.”

“Behind?”

“Yeah. On education and stuff.”

Melissa frowned and glanced pointedly at a classroom where rows of ten-year-olds were reciting their nine times tables.

“Oh, we have school, sure. But we don’t have Youth Group, you know? I don’t know how to fight or shoot or give a good speech or drive or write a budget or any of that. My mom died when I was ten. That’s a lot of catching up, and nobody wants to bring home a kid that far behind, who doesn’t have any social connections or apprenticeships lined up.”

“Hmm,” Melissa said neutrally. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was – that was pretty sad, but kind of necessary. Most of these kids would be slaves, and we didn’t want slaves who knew how to fight or write a budget; they could cause problems. If we taught kids in orphanages that sort of thing, we’d have to lobotomise a lot more slaves, and that would be crueller in the long run.

Apparently mistaking her neutral tone for pity, Harold grinned. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve got it all sorted out. I help the groundskeepers a lot, and I’m really good at it, so I’m pretty sure that when I turn sixteen the orphanage will keep me around to do that. Kind of like an apprenticeship. But for your project, you’ll want to focus on the little kids, especially cute, white ones with Class One grades. Behaviour records don’t matter; when they’re that young, parents think they can still teach them to be good and might even prefer to ‘save’ disobedient kids from a life of crime. There’s a class of five-year-olds over – hey, where are you going?”

We were turning down another corridor. “My dog wants to go this way,” Melissa shrugged. “Is anything interesting down here?”

“Hmm… well, this time of day, the seven-year-olds are learning needlecraft. Might make for some cute photos.”

“Sounds good.”

About sixty feet down this hall, Tobias stopped. <This door conceals some stairs that lead to the basement levels,> he said. Melissa stopped behind him, and crouched down, pretending to find a rock in her shoe; while Harold politely waited, Marco, Ax and I raced down her arms and under the door.

Like the rest of the institution, the stairs weren’t carpeted, but some kind of rough linoleum had been stuck down for grip. It certainly wasn’t cleaned very often; I could feel years of grime under my sticky little lizard feet. Dim yellow lightbulbs lit the stairs. After verifying that we were alone, I ordered a demorph so that we could wear bodies more suited to seeing in such an environment.

I tried not to let my nervousness show. I was ranked third in our little band of guerrilla fighters (based mostly on our ability scores, family heritage and political status; we weren’t a formal military and didn’t have a proper system for merit-based promotion), but I absolutely hated command. Jake and Melissa were natural leaders; Marco and I, the next two in seniority, were more natural advisors. Normally, Jake split our teams to reflect that, and I had no idea why he’d decided to do things differently this time. Maybe he was trying to keep an eye on Melissa. Maybe his strange insecurity there was finally starting to cause problems.

Or maybe it was me. Maybe his suspicions that I was radical were reaching the point where he didn’t want Melissa and me paired together, and wanted Marco to keep an eye on me instead. But why wouldn’t he have kept an eye on me himself, and paired Marco with Melissa?

We morphed kittens. They had the perfect mixture of good eyesight, excellent dexterity and small size, although their easily-distracted, playful instincts could be a bit much to deal with at times. They were also frequently safer than lizards, although not always – in a place like this, kittens would probably be killed outright by the staff, or sent to a pound to be killed. So we had to be careful not to be seen.

We headed down the stairs, three little balls of fluff looking for something to hunt. Ax darted out ahead of me, and I resisted the urge to jump on his back and wrestle him. That would be extremely undignified.

<Did Tobias say what this basement area was for?> I asked.

<Storage, right?> said Marco.

<The one under the kitchen and factory is for storage,> Ax reminded us. <This one was not specified.>

When we reached the bottom of the stairs, I realised why Tobias hadn’t specified. The stairs opened into a kind of reception area, where a bored-looking guard picked at her nails. There were benches lining the concrete walls; nobody was sitting on them, but there were cuffs attached to them, waiting for delinquent ankles.

This basement was a detention and behavioural correction area.

There were two other doors in the room. One was to a cage, so it was easy to see what was inside – boxes, sharp fragments of plastic, books, a radio, a couple of dolls. Confiscated contraband, probably, although I wasn’t sure how anyone in a place like this would even get contraband. The other was behind the guard’s desk, and presumably led to the rest of the correctional facility. We used the benches for cover and darted across the room and through the door. The guard didn’t notice.

It opened into a corridor lined with doors, much closer together than the classroom doors. They were practically side-by-side, twenty along each side of the corridor. These led to very small rooms, although the heavy locks on them suggested that they weren’t mere closets, unless something very dangerous was being kept down here. It wasn’t until I heard quiet sobbing coming from one that I realised what they were; solitary confinement chambers.

I quelled the anger within me. It was illegal to enslave anyone below the age of sixteen, but these kids were already being treated like slaves. I knew, though, that it made sense, especially for the blacklisted kids whose futures were certain. They had the right to learn proper social behaviour so that they would reach their full potential, just like I did. They had the right to become productive members of society, whether they were free citizens or not; to be the most skilled and best socialised workers they could be, and sell for the highest price possible. They had as much right as I did to contribute to our society; protesting their training was as ridiculous as protesting my right to be in Youth Group or work for my dad. I was used to these little bouts of rage. I was naturally sentimental, and had to work hard to quell such irrational impulses. We all had our weaknesses.

The complex was quite large, so I ordered everyone to split up and meet back at solitary in an hour. The occasional people wandering about were easy to avoid, so long as I kept my ears open and made sure to stay near stuff that was easy to duck under.

The basement wasn’t just correctional, I found; beyond the disciplinary rooms were the institution archives, where the kids’ behaviour, condition and abilities would be tracked and recorded. In there should be a list of every Clearview orphan, past and present, with their family backgrounds (if they were known), adoption availability, test and ability scores, psych profiles and predicted future industry. In there, somewhere, was Tobias A-Thirteen (orphans didn’t have last names even if their birth parents were known), with the records that he’d passed every ability test, notes on recorded social and behavioural problems, and the birthdate that would become his name when he turned sixteen unless some family picked him up first. In there was a mark that he was no longer with the institution. How would they record that? Would they admit the escape in their records, or call it accidental death?

There was storage underground, too; a lot of weapons and so forth, which made me wonder if the security building out back also had stairs down to this area. The door to that storeroom was locked, but there was a vent leading inside and none of the actual items were secured in any way. I climbed through the vent and waited, listening hard, to make sure I was alone. Then I morphed an adult (white, male and blonde; the least suspicious type of adult), found a guard uniform that fit, and filled my belt with guard equipment.

The lock on the door was the kind that could be opened from inside without a key. I strolled confidently out into the corridor, no longer needing to hide to avoid being picked up and drowned by well-meaning strangers trying to nip a potential feral cat problem in the bud.

Now. Kandrona.

I knew what a Kandrona looked like. I just had to find somewhere in this maze of rooms and equipment that it could be stored.

That could be _anywhere_.

The Kandronas I’d seen were about the size of a car, and only had to shine on one Yeerk Pool just under the town. This one was two hours away, so assuming it also wanted to reach our hometown and act as a backup for that, it would have to be… well, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how the… the size to power ratio, or whatever, worked. But massive, right? It’d have to be massive? So it wouldn’t just be on a shelf in an evidence room, or locked in a solitary cell, or something. And it’d have to be somewhere where non-Controllers wouldn’t see it, or if they did, wouldn’t question it. Somewhere with low foot traffic? There were unlikely to be very many Controllers on staff because a two hour trip to our town to feed every three days would be very difficult to arrange. The work would have to be done by people who could come and go; contractors, probably. And they’d be using the supply delivery vans and factory export vans to bring parts in, so those guys would have to be involved too… where would be an easy place for them to get stuff to?

I wished I had a map.

I looked down at the floors. They’d been flattened, but they were the natural stone of the area – nobody had bothered to put in actual flooring. There was a shiny, worn stripe down the center of the corridor, polished by hundreds, possibly thousands, of feet.

Now, if I were an alien invader building something very important where I wouldn’t want non-alien staff to find it…

I searched for less shiny corridors. There were a lot of them, many of them cobwebbed and dusty. It took a while, but eventually I found what I was looking for – a corridor with the matte floor of the barely used, but that had been recently cleaned. Perfect.

It was long, but contained very few doors. Only one of the doors was locked, so I headed straight for that one. None of the keys on my ring fit the heavy padlock, but it was the old pin-and-tumbler kind; I picked it without trouble. I tossed the lock aside and pushed the heavy iron door aside, to be greeted with the greatest sight I’d seen all day.

It was a Kandrona.


	5. Chapter 5

Half a Kandrona, at any rate. I wasn’t sure how the devices worked, but I’d seen their remnants a few times. The key difference between this one and the ones we’d destroyed, apart from the fact that it hadn’t been completed, was that said parts were massive. The long crystalline probe that sat up the centre of the device was normally about the full length of my arm; this one was the size of my adult man morph. The metal coil that curled around it like a huge spring, normally about a quarter the size of the Kandrona, was the size of a car, meaning that when it was complete this Kandrona would probably be the size of the entire room. The outer metal casing was nowhere in sight, but the semitransparent red material that usually filled out the space between casing and interior was being… well, built. The probe and coil rested in a huge tub, taking up most of the floor, filled with a thick, bitter-smelling red fluid that was slowly crystallising on the parts. I wondered vaguely if it was toxic, then remembered it didn’t matter; I had healing powers.

What I did not have was a morph capable of destroying something like this. Marco’s elephant or Ax’s rhino could have done it, but just our luck, I happened to be the one to find the damn thing.

<Marco. Ax. You guys in range?>

No response. I’d have to go looking. I carefully locked the door behind me, turned, and froze.

There was a girl a few paces away. She looked about my age, although rather taller than my normal body. She was dressed, as all the orphans were, in the fashionable, branded clothing that they presumably made in the factory. Her blonde hair was cut close to her scalp, and she was looking at me with frightened but mildly accusatory eyes. There was a mop in her hands – just my luck to be here as a cleaner was passing.

It was obvious at a glance that she was blacklisted, and a serious toublemaker. Probably mentally ill, or at the very least a repeat delinquent. This was made clear by the small circular burns on her inner wrists, inner elbows and temples – electroshock therapy wasn’t supposed to leave marks, but I’d seen a couple of slaves with overly corrective masters who’d used it too often or at too high a voltage. She didn’t look lobotomised (lobotomised slaves couldn’t be that scared and that composed at the same time), but that might just be because she was too young. Either way, her value to society was obviously extremely low, which gave me a broader range of options than I’d normally have. Firing a gun in a narrow hallway didn’t seem like the best idea, and I preferred not to handle them anyway, so instead I reached for my taser.

And was promptly struck with a mop.

It was embarrassing, really. I did pretty well at self-defense in Youth Group; well enough that I should’ve seen the mop coming and ducked. Instead I gawped like an idiot while it slammed me across the temple and knocked me backwards into the wall, which also struck me in the head and left me in a dazed lump on the floor.

In my defense, I hadn’t expected her to try to fight me. The penalty for a slave striking a citizen is death, and I doubted that things would go much better than that for a skinny troublemaking orphan alone with a guard. But the war had taught me to react to new situations quickly, and by the time I hit the ground, I’d already adjusted. As she brought the mop down top-first to drive the handle between my ribs, I rolled out of the way onto my back, threw all my weight onto my shoulders and kicked upward with both heels right into her chest. I’d forgotten that my current morph had more strength than my natural body; the girl flew into the opposite wall with a loud crack. I got up; so did she. Both our heads were bleeding.

The mop lay in two pieces at my feet. Two broken, pointy sticks. I kicked them behind me, out of her reach, and reached again for my taser. She dropped into a wide half-crouch and raised her hands, wrists together, fingers outstretched as if ready to grab.

I hesitated. It was obviously a fighting stance, but it wasn’t any fighting style I’d ever seen. Perhaps the girl was a Primitive and had been taught some barbarian style before coming to civilisation? White Primitive tribes were rare – whites tended to be too sensible and advanced for that sort of thing – but they did exist. But that seemed pretty unlikely.

She stepped back with one foot, then the other, shifting her weight evenly as she did so. Her eyes didn’t leave me as she moved away.

She clearly knew what she was doing. If she wasn’t using some Primitive technique (possible but unlikely), and it wasn’t a technique I’d seen, then it must be an alien technique. The girl was a controller.

I drew my taser. She stepped farther back.

“You won’t win,” she hissed. “You’re not a guard! That’s not your face! You can kill me, but I’m not the only one who’s noticed!”

I froze. She knew I was in morph? Even as a controller, how did she know?

She took my shock as an opportunity to turn and run. I tried to chase her, but within a dozen paces it was clear that my morph wasn’t up to long-distance running. I could demorph, but it’d give her too much of a head start to be worth it.

That was when the security alarm went off. The shrill sound bounced through the tunnels and bored into my mind like a beaver’s teeth cutting wood. I hesitated, indecisive – on the one hand, the Kandrona was right there, and if I could get Ax or Marco in range they could destroy or at least damage it. On the other, I had no idea where they were. We always set up a meetup point in case we needed to retreat in situations like this, so the most expedient thing to do was probably to meet up with the other Animorphs there, report the location, and come back. We wouldn’t need Tobias now that we had a location, so it would be much easier to get in.

I found my way out of the underground complex – the guard uniform made this very easy; the woman in the little correctional reception room didn’t even ask for ID as I left – and emerged into a corridor with no sound but the blaring alarm. I glanced into a classroom window as I passed and saw that the kids were still in there, but were crouched silently under their desks. Weird.

Outside, the scream of the alarm was muted. There were two guards on each door now, looking very alert, so I did my best to look like I was busy and knew exactly where I was going as I breezed past a pair of them and headed for the hedge maze.

I started demorphing as soon as I was shielded by shrubbery. By the time I reached the others, I was human. Jake’s team had arrived, as had Ax; Marco was still MIA, and I hoped that whatever was going on wasn’t his fault this time.

Everyone was in their normal bodies except Ax, who perched on the hedge as a wren. <There is some sort of conflict at the main gate,> he reported as I rushed over. <A small mob of armed civilians is attempting to gain entry.>

“Terrorists,” Jake said.

<Why would terrorists attack an orphanage?> Ax asked.

“They’re here for their kids,” I said. “Some parents don’t take well to their kids failing health and ability tests.”

“Kind of pointless, really,” Jake said. “Let’s say they do get through the gate – what are they going to do? Drive their kids home and put them in school the next day without anyone noticing? They’re just wasting everyone’s time.”

“They leave the Empire,” Melissa said.

Jake frowned. “They what?”

“They pay people smugglers to get them out. Either just the kids, or the whole families. The smugglers are hard to catch but there are an awful lot of people with clear Empire lineages showing up on the other side of battlefields.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jake said doubtfully.

Melissa snorted. “Not in the footage they show in school or put on TV, no. But some of the stuff that goes through dad’s office is a bit more varied.”

“I can’t believe that anyone with two cells in their head would choose to live in the mud like an animal just to dedicate themselves to fawning over a blacklisted defective,” Jake snorted.

And I shouldn’t have said anything. I know I shouldn’t have. The words were out of my mouth before I could think about it.

I said, “What would you do if Tom were blacklisted?”

I knew I would get a look of irritation for that, and some sort of reprimand. Maybe some small revenge. What I didn’t expect was Jake’s look of pure, unfiltered hate at the remark. The weight of his glare pushed all the blood from my face and I realised I must have inadvertently touched – crushed, more like – some nerve I hadn’t seen. But before he could say anything, Marco crashed right through a hedge, landing face-first in the dirt.

“So are we ready to get out of here while it’s still gonna be possible to walk Tobias out the gate?” he asked, standing up and brushing himself off as if nothing had happened.

“We should destroy the Kandrona first,” I said. “It’s under the education complex.”

The others stared at me.

<Couldn’t have led with that, Cassie?> Tobias asked.

I shrugged. “It’s massive and only half-built and I didn’t have a morph that could destroy it. Someone with something bigger needs to get in there. But we need to be careful, I think there might already be controllers here. I ran into this girl outside the Kandrona and she accused me of being in morph and tried to kill me.”

Everyone stared.

<Again, Cassie, that’s conversation-opening kind of material.>

“A guard?” Marco asked.

“An orphan.”

“Huh. That’s way worse.”

“Why? They’re basically helpless. She knew some kind of weird fighting technique but armed guards would be worse.”

“If orphans are controllers,” Marco said slowly and patiently, like I was an idiot, “then that means they expect to complete the Kandrona within three days.”

<What’s going to happen to them when we destroy it?> Tobias asked.

“What?”

<The orphan controllers. If they were guards, they could transfer somewhere else. But there’s no way to get those kids to a Yeerk Pool. What happens to them after three days? The yeerks won’t want people talking.>

We thought about this.

“Viral outbreak?” I asked.

“No, it’d raise too many questions,” Marco said, shaking his head. “Even if they fake the kids’ autopsies, people will wonder where the virus came from. I bet they put them all to work in the same building at the same time and collapse it or something.”

“You’re thinking too small,” Melissa said. “They’ll take advantage of it.”

“Advantage how?” I asked.

“They’ll frame it in some way so it looks like those terrorists out there got them killed. Slipped poison in a food truck or something.”

<We should come back another time,> Tobias said.

“Why?” Jake asked.

<If they identified Cassie, they know we’re here. They know we’re going for the Kandrona. I bet they’re setting a trap for us right now.>

We waited patiently while Jake considered the situation.

“Alright,” he said. “We retreat and come back another time. It’s probably better to let them think they’ve won and waste time on more construction, anyway. Everyone back in your morphs to get us through the gate.”

We morphed. Melissa talked her way through the back security gate to avoid the terrorists, which the guards were happy to allow. Next time, I supposed, we’d probably be leaving Tobias behind, so we could just fly over the fence. Assuming the yeerks didn’t have any anti-bird policies in place by then. Assuming they hadn’t locked the place down completely by then.

I knew better than to say anything while Jake was still mad at me, but I had the strong, inexplicable feeling that returning without Tobias would be a huge mistake.


	6. Chapter 6

I got home later than I expected, which meant I’d need to sneak in. I wasn’t worried about the slaves seeing me; they knew better than to tattle. But if Mom saw me, I’d be in for one hell of a lecture.

I intended to squeeze through my slightly-open window as a sparrow, but as I flew over the house, I saw a light moving about in the barn. Thieves? It might just be September finishing her chores, but maybe…

I fluttered over to land on the open door. It wasn’t September. It was my two parents. They were arguing.

“That’s twice in three months, Michelle!” Dad snapped. “Do you understand how dangerous this is?”

“Oh, so I should have let him die in the forest, should I?”

“Yes! Yes, you should have let him die. That’s the risk he took!”

“He’s eight years old, Walter. He’s eight and he stood on the wrong stone and cut his foot open. Forgive me if I don’t think that should be a death sentence.”

“I’d like to save every refugee who makes it into that forest as much as you would, but if we lose the farm, we lose all of them. And every time we steal from the clinic, we draw suspicion to the farm. To you, and me, and Cassie.”

Mom paused. “Cassie has nothing to do with this.”

“In an ideal world, she wouldn’t. But what’s going to happen to her if they audit the Clinic and arrest both of us?”

“They won’t. We discussed this. They’ll arrest me, the seditious witch who duped her husband for years as an enemy of the state, while you play ignorant and go completely, one hundred per cent clean, the poor upright father who now needs to raise his honorable daughter all alone. We’ve arranged everything, from the beginning, so that we can pull that off if we have to.”

“After all these years, you honestly still believe I’d throw you to the wolves like that?”

“Yes. For Cassie’s sake, you would.”

“And that’s going to reflect well on her, isn’t it? Having a mother who – ”

“We are _saving lives_ , Walter. I won’t let my daughter come to harm, but if she has to endure a few extra government tests if we’re found out, then – ”

“If we’re found out and you want me to be there for her, it’s going to be a lot more than a few government tests. They’re going to go through everything. They might take the Clinic from us; rehome us. Even if they don’t, I’d have to go completely, sincerely clean; there’d be no room for mistakes. They’d go through all our records, and they’ll send trackers up through that forest into the mountains to find your hidden valley of rebels and slaves, and there’d be absolutely nothing I could do to stop them from executing the lot of them. Stolen drugs might keep an eight-year-old boy alive, but they could end up killing that entire settlement.”

“Why do you assume I told you the truth about the valley?”

“Valley, river, nomadic foraging circuit; it doesn’t matter! If they’re close enough to get drugs to, they can be tracked! We have rebels on our doorstep that we put there, both of us are guilty as hell, and we’re trying to do our good honest jobs and raise a good honest daughter at the same time! Sometimes I feel like it’s just us against the world, like we’re fighting a secret war and our real lives are becoming more of a facade every day, and I don’t think you’re taking the risks seriously.”

“You don’t think I’m – _you_ don’t think _I’m_ taking the risks seriously? I made these plans! I chart the extractions! I know what I’m doing!”

“Our teenage daughter is getting suspicious of the drug deficiencies.”

“She’ll just assume it’s the slaves.”

“How many antibiotics do a couple of slaves need? She’s not stupid. If she tries to follow up and stop them on her own – ”

“Then we publically blame them, inform the police, and whisk them off to the valley before they can be arrested! We can buy new slaves, Walter!”

“If you’d let me hide the stock in pretending some animals need more to – ”

“Absolutely not. If I am caught, you have to be squeaky clean. That means perfectly clean Clinic accounts.”

I’d heard enough. I flew back to the house, squeezed into my bedroom window, and demorphed.

Yeerks. It had to be yeerks. They’d found out who we were, or at least who I was, and instead of grabbing me they were staging some kind of… something. To trick me. That was the only reasonable explanation, because the obvious explanation wasn’t reasonable.

My parents weren’t traitors.

They couldn’t be. They believed in world peace. They believed in the future. They loved and respected life, and wanted the life that came after them to have the best chance, and they’d raised me to be the same. Clearly, I’d misunderstood something here. They couldn’t be rebels, they must be… sheltering someone who had been incorrectly processed. Like maybe this kid’s family failed health tests because they had some completely benign trait that came up weird in the tests and the government didn’t know about it, and they were just hiding them until all the research had been correlated to clear them. That happened sometimes. Blood types had played havoc with some of the early tests. But they’d said there was a settlement and mentioned escaped slaves so it had to be more than this one family; maybe it was some really common error that Mom’s research had uncovered, and her team was about to publish and revolutionise the future of medicine and fitness testing and go down in history as legends. So she’d gone to Dad and he’d helped her hide them and this kid had cut himself and needed antibiotics and…

I tried to think back to the first time that I’d noticed strange dips in the animal medicine supplies. My only clue as to how long this might have been going on. It wasn’t the sort of information I tended to memorise. Months at least, right? Could it have been years?

That was reasonable. Research took a long time. Maybe that really was what was happening. But if it was, why shelter runaway slaves? It’s not like they could be saved; they were already sterilised. Why suggest helping our slaves “escape” as a potential ploy to avoid being caught? Sure, it might be worth it if the discovery were big enough; September and October were hardly dangerous. The Animorphs did things that were technically criminal in an effort to protect humanity all the time; I couldn’t hold Mom to a different standard. But she’d suggested it so easily. Like it was nothing. Like sheltering escaped slaves, for whatever reason, was routine. No… no, I had to face the truth.

My mother, the rebel, actively sheltering enemies of the state.

My father, playing cover-up, eager to betray the Empire even more and held back only out of concern for my future.

If they were so concerned about my future, why were they trying to destroy it? Why were they draining resources that belonged to humanity as a whole to support the weak, the unfit? Eight years old was too young to be sterilised; if they were planning to hide him through puberty and beyond – if they had other minors out there! – then they were endangering not only the resources for the moment but the very advancement of our species, deliberately allowing weakness to fester and spread. What was to stop those unfit people from having children; what was to stop the risk of their weaknesses finding a way to flow back into the human population at large?

Why would my own parents do something like this?

And I couldn’t even turn them in. Of course I couldn’t, even if my weak, sentimental core would let me. Because if both of my parents were arrested for sedition then I’d be arrested too, and end up in some very yeerk-heavy place – a judge’s chamber, a reeducation center, an orphanage – where they could force a slug into my brain and learn all about the Animorphs.

But I could turn Mom in, force Dad to go clean, wipe the infection from the forest; that’s what I should do. That was the morally right course of action. I should go downstairs, call the hotline, and report her.

I didn’t move. Why wasn’t I moving?

I was in shock; that had to be it. I knew what the right thing to do was. I’d fought a hundred battles by now; I knew how to work past the soft, weak, selfish part of myself who wanted to put the people I personally knew above the whole of humanity. I knew how to do this. One foot in front of the other. Pick up the phone. But I wasn’t moving. Must be shock.

I needed time to digest. Time to recover. I needed to think carefully, after all; I couldn’t just narrate the conversation I’d heard, since it implicated Dad as well. I needed to figure out exactly what I was going to say. I couldn’t move too hastily.

I should, I decided, sleep on it. So that I’d have the time to properly figure things out. Yes.

I’d missed dinner, but October had left a plate for me. I snuck down to eat, left the plate on the table, and went to bed. Everything else could wait.

Everything else could wait.


	7. Chapter 7

I was in somewhat of a haze for school the next day. I earned two soft demerits before lunch for my lack of focus, but that didn’t matter; demerit records were wiped at age eighteen, and soft demerits didn’t even earn punishment. Even hard demerits no longer mattered to us Animorphs, because we could morph away any cuts or bruises from too harsh a beating. School staff weren’t allowed to hit students in the face, so the fast healing wasn’t obvious.

I wasn’t thinking about punishment, of course. I wasn’t thinking about grades or records or even yeerks. What was the point? My whole life was a lie.

“You okay?” Melissa mumbled to me at lunch.

“Yeah.” I said. “Just worried about this orphanage thing.” I tried not to look like I was avoiding her gaze. I trusted Melissa, I loved Melissa, but this wasn’t something that she could ever know about. She was going to be a future leader. I was supposed to be a future leader, on a smaller scale. How could I explain to her that my family were a bunch of parasites, draining the strength of the Empire to feed its enemies? We had one such war on our hands already.

Fortunately, she bought it. “Jake wants to try again tonight,” she said. “I can’t go.”

I nodded, and glanced over at Jake and Marco on the other side of the cafeteria. We didn’t interact at school very much; it was too suspicious. Jake met my eyes, glanced at Melissa, and we exchanged microscopic nods. Message received.

“After school?” I asked Melissa.

“He wants to infiltrate after dark. Meet at six, fly over.”

“Got it.”

“So, you’re going to volunteer for the radio thing?”

“What?”

“The school radio station! You know; you told me about it yesterday!”

“Oh. Right. That.” I tried to force myself to think such a thing could be important. “Maybe. But I don’t want to be involved in getting things off the ground, you know? I’ll see how the station does first. You?”

“I was thinking about it. Mom and Dad want me to have hobbies that demonstrate leadership. But what if it cuts into the time for our… other activities?”

“That’d be a risk,” I agreed. “But it could also be an excuse to keep your parents off your back when they’re wondering what you do with all your time. Just blame the radio.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

I let myself zone out again, focusing on the mission. Would I remember how to reach the Kandrona? It would be suspicious to have all the Animorphs wandering around down there as a mob, dressed as guards, but if a couple of us did that and just carried the rest in our pockets… except that controller girl would have reported me to the yeerks, so they’d be on the lookout…

I spent the rest of the school day plotting, earning myself a third soft demerit. Three in one day was a concern, but I had a good enough record that nobody signed me up for counselling. Occasional bad days were normal. I got home and tried to spend at little time with my parents and slaves as possible. I couldn’t stand to look at any of them right then. They were all traitors, willing to destroy the future for their own selfish personal gain.

Well, technically, the slaves didn’t have anything to do with anything. But I knew they would if they had the opportunity. The vast majority of slaves are too stupid to focus on a future several generations away, and even smart ones like September can be unsettlingly seditious. It hadn’t mattered before because slaves with decent owners can be stewarded for their own good, but if my parents were traitors…

I took an early dinner, found my parents watching the news together at five thirty, and announced, “I’m going out.”

“No you aren’t, young lady,” Mom said.

“Going out where?” Dad asked.

“Melissa invited me to a thing,” I said, not in the mood to be elaborate. “I’ll get home later.”

“Didn’t you go to a thing with Melissa last night?” Dad asked.

“I checked your school records,” Mom said. “You’re behind on your geography assignments.”

“I’ll do it later.”

“Compass, you’ll march right back to your room and – ”

“Don’t presume to tell me what to do,” I snapped. Both of my parents stared at me in shock. I had flaws, but disrespect wasn’t usually one of them. I tried to remember if I’d ever spoken like that to my parents.

Mom recovered first, rising to her feet. “I am your mother,” she said in a low, warning tone.

“Worse luck for me,” I spat.

Mom raised her arm and backhanded me across my face. I should have been able to stand up to the blow – yeerks did much worse to me all the time – but surprise paralysed me, and I was knocked to the ground. My parents hadn’t hit me since… how long? Years, at least. They didn’t even like it if school staff hit me. They’d always held the opinion that citizens, even children, should be too smart and responsible to need such a crass form of discipline.

Dad grabbed my arm and lifted me up. “We should talk about – ”

“Talk about what?” I snapped, wrenching my arm free from his grasp. “Talk about how you’re a pair of lying traitors trying to destroy our future?”

My parents froze. Exchanged a glance. Realisation spread across both their faces.

“Cassie,” Dad said gently, “whatever you think you heard – ”

“I know what I heard,” I growled. “I can’t believe my whole life has been a lie. I can’t believe the two of you would do something like this.”

“Why not?” Mom asked.

“What?”

“Why can’t you believe it? If it’s unbelievable, that suggests you’re missing some key information, doesn’t it?” She sat back down on the couch and gestured to a chair. “Let’s talk.”

“Michelle...” Dad murmured.

She raised her brows at him. “What would you suggest, then?”

He sighed, shrugged, and sat down. I remained where I was.

“Cassie,” Mom began. “You understand our job, yes? You understand how important it is to respect biodiversity.”

“I’m not four years old.”

“Right. Well, if we apply that to humanity – ”

“We _are_ applying it to humanity,” I pointed out. “That’s why we have such biodiversity. It’s why those Purists who occasionally wiggle their way into political office need to be smacked down when they start droning rhetoric about how one or two races have all of humanity’s strengths and by ditching the inferior ones we can ascend humanity into a new, permanent golden age.”

“But you do want to ascend humanity into a new, permanent golden age,” Dad pointed out.

“Yes, properly. With science. Which is what we’re doing.”

“What makes you think that?”

That threw me. “What? What do you mean?”

“What makes you think that this Empire’s strategy is going to lead to such a future?”

“That’s the whole _point_ ,” I pointed out. “We’re securing a better future for our children. We’re building a world where humanity can thrive.”

“Are we?”

“Yes! You can’t just ask questions and present nothing and act like that’s an argument!”

“We live in a world where little children take physical, sensory and intelligence tests and are taken from their families, their futures stolen, if they don’t meet some arbitrary minimum level. Does that sound like a society people should want to be a part of?”

“It sounds like a society building something that everyone should want to be a part of, yes. There’s nothing arbitrary about basic health standards.”

“Of course there is! Who do you think decides those standards? Somebody somewhere said that people whose visual acuity doesn’t fit certain parameters can’t lead healthy, productive lives as civilians and need to be enslaved so that better people could channel their productivity for them. What does visual acuity have to do with having the intelligence to make your own decisions?”

“Do you want someone who can’t see driving a car?” I snapped. “Failing to learn how to read? Breeding with other people who can’t see to make even blinder kids, or even worse, with people who can see, lowering the overall quality of sight in the general population? Humanity would go far then, wouldn’t we, a world of blind, illiterate – ”

“I know you’ve seen people with glasses.”

“Yeah, slaves and elderly people! I can’t imagine the kind of horrific world where we had to just hand them out to kids! And let’s not just talk about sight – do you want us to stop testing for other frailties too? A world of blind, deaf cripples with the intelligence of dogs and the emotional control of toddlers. Is that the future you see for us?” The concept revolted me. Humans would be barely better than yeerks. “They’d drown out and destroy everything good about – ”

“How?” Mom cut in.

“What?”

“What you suggest is overblown rhetoric; allowing people to just exist as people wouldn’t create a sudden plague of disability throughout the Empire, but let’s imagine for a second that it did. How would that ‘drown out’ the things you’re calling ‘good’?” Her tone had slipped into the neutral, impassive tone of a scientist who had spent years training herself to avoid value judgements in research. “If I understand your argument correctly – and I am using some conjecture based on what the Empire has taught you here – you believe that this system is supposed to concentrate traits that give humans various natural strengths and advantages, while weeding out weaker traits, so that future generations will be healthier and stronger and not have to deal with the same sorts of horrible problems that we have. Yes?”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course.”

“Then why is the system necessary? If intelligence is such an advantage, if sensory impairments are such a huge problem, if unstable, ‘radical’ elements are self-defeating, then why does all this rigmarole need to exist? Nature filters itself.”

“Not in the ways we want it to! Nature aims for survival of traits, not the benefit of people. Nature made humans stupid and flawed and narrow-minded and greedy and warlike. If we want to do better, we have to take control.”

“Ah, yes, a handful of traits that don’t describe the Empire at all,” Dad said sardonically. “Trying to conquer the whole world is – ”

“Unify the world!” I snarled. “This isn’t some little resource-grab between a couple of Primitive tribes! We’re bringing enlightenment and a better standard of living to – ”

“The surviviors? Come on, we already know you don’t agree with how this war is being fought.”

“You’re right. I didn’t. But now, I don’t know what I believe, because apparently half of my education has been in the hands of a pair of radical traitors! How much of what I know is just anti-Empire propaganda?”

“How much of what you know is just Empire propaganda?”

“See? Like that! You’re referring to school, aren’t you? Education isn’t propaganda. Facts are neutral. Don’t… don’t look at each other like that, like I’m just some kid overreacting to a bad grade or something! My parents are enemies of humanity!”

“You have a very narrow definition of ‘humanity’,” Dad said calmly. “What about people like September and October? Or the foreign tribes being wiped out? If your mother and I were caught, do you think the friends of humanity would do a single thing for you, a perfectly well-behaved, competent and responsible little girl? What about kids who are born a little strange, or to parents who don’t want them? What about clever, cheerful, kind souls who happen to be unable to walk or hear or have good enough memories to pass arbitrary tests? What about people who are politically inconvenient, who can be easily dealt with by fabricating criminal histories or poor scores for them? If we’re enemies of anyone, Compass, it’s the enemies of humanity.”

“The government doesn’t fabricate criminal histories,” I scoffed, “or change scores. That’s propaganda. Everyone plays their part in building the future. Everyone, from slaves to administrators, is part of the same species, working towards the same goal. Some people get a more difficult job than others, but that’s just how the world is. We can’t change the realities of biology, or what resources we have. This isn’t some magical land where we can pretend everyone’s equal and everyone will be happy.”

“Do you know Melissa’s ability scores?”

“Melissa does fine in everything. I don’t need to know her scores.”

“Strange that yours are public record and hers aren’t, isn’t it? Ever noticed how the kids of rich and powerful families almost never get blacklisted?”

I frowned. “Are you saying _Melissa_ should be blacklisted?”

“Not at all. I don’t know anything about Melissa’s records. That’s the point. The more we know about people, the more excuses there are to exploit them and control their behaviour. And the more powerful someone is, the less we know about them or their families. Don’t you find it a little strange that what’s best for humanity as a whole almost always serves to benefit the parts of humanity who get to make those decisions at the expense of everyone else? Do you honestly think it’s coincidence that wealthy, powerful people almost never end up blacklisted or arrested, and yet crime and incompetence seem to run rife in lower-class communities?”

“I think it’s good breeding,” I pointed out. “Smarter, stronger, healthier, more responsible and dutiful people rise to the top. They pass those traits on. So of course you see less problems at the top. That’s evolution 101. Come on, you’re _biologists_.”

“That’s not how evolution works and you know it,” Mom said.

“No, it’s better. As a society, we’re taking our fate and our future into our own hands. We’d go extinct if we didn’t.”

“Strange how the world is so full of puzzlingly non-extinct human societies beyond our borders,” Dad said. “People who live perfectly happy, perfectly healthy lives, at least until somebody else stomps all over their land with an army.”

I pursed my lips. I knew what he wanted me to say. He was expecting me to retort with something like, ‘Because that army is better equipped to survive than they are,’ which was the sort of answer that someone like Melissa or Jake or Marco might give. Saying that would be a mistake, because it was an utterly stupid statement. He knew that I knew that being able to beat up everyone else didn’t make you better, biologically, except in certain remote fringe cases. We weren’t trying to build the Ultimate Military Society; we were trying to build a single unified society where war would be unknown, where our descendants could live happily in peace and security. Absorbing the rest of humanity around the globe was a necessary transitional step for their own good; our ability to do that said nothing about our fitness as a whole in the society we were trying to build.

So instead I said, “They’re well on their way to it. They’re lands of death, decay and misery, and our help can’t get there fast enough.”

“Really?” Dad asked, raising his brows in mock surprise. “When did you last go to Brazil?”

“We do study the wars in school, you know. I’ve seen plenty of footage taken there, from before the war. Crying kids living in stick huts, all kinds of horrible infections from primitive medicine...”

“Footage carefully picked by the very people who profit off the war,” Dad said, nodding.

“At least the Empire can look after its own kids!” I snapped. I forced down the memories rising in my mind of the orphanage, of those solitary confinement chambers underground, of the girl with electroshock burn scars on her arms and temples.

“Are you saying that if we went out to some small Empire town and drove around looking we wouldn’t be able to find, oh let’s say, a hungry-looking homeless family before the police found them? That we couldn’t film such a family and send it to Brazil to show them what a poor and wretched place the Empire is?”

I rolled my eyes. “The Empire’s not terrible just because it doesn’t immediately stop every single problem for every single citizen. That’s just unrealistic.”

“But if I wanted to, I could probably scrape together some footage that made it look really awful,” Dad said. “And I could convince people in other nations that it was a terrible place with an incompetent government that couldn’t look after its people.”

“Sure, if you wanted to lie to them. But having some dirty hems doesn’t condemn the Empire. We have a lot of things going for us that Primitive places don’t.”

“Because you’ve only seen carefully chosen Empire footage of those places? Footage chosen by the very people who want to show you how terrible it is?”

“Have you ever spoken to Brazillian people?” Mom asked. “You have a few of them at your school now, right?”

“I don’t go around talking to every student,” I snapped. Why did she think I’d have need to talk to Primitives? I wasn’t very social, but did she honestly think I was that low in the school’s social hierarchy?

“Well,” she said, “I’ve spoken to several people born outside the Empire. Some integrated willingly, or less willingly, and some… did not.”

“Slaves, you mean.”

“Runaways, certainly. And they all tell pretty similar stories. Their homes were doing just fine; they were stable communities with about as many good things and bad things as we’d see here, and the odd lame child or blind grandmother didn’t condemn their societies to misery and degeneration. They got along just as well as anyone else – better, in fact, since they didn’t have the looming threat of losing citizenship if they had a bad accident or said something the local law enforcement happened not to like.”

“I wouldn’t put much stock in those memories,” I said drily. “Unless you’re going to tell me that the Empire just made up the Russian Famine or Brazillian Drug War Crisis years before we ever got there.”

“Horrible periods afflict every society,” Dad said, “but they’re usually much better dealt with by banding together with your neighbours and facing problems with love and solidarity, rather than wantonly enslaving and executing whoever sets off your hair trigger by looking vaguely threatening or not meeting some arbitrary level of perfection that you set up because it looked good at first glance and didn’t bother to scientifically verify.”

“Ah yes, if we hug and sing and feel good feelings, everything will be just fine,” I sneered.

Mom cocked her head. “Right, I forgot that ‘difficult and cruel’ was the same thing as ‘smart’. That the harshest response to anything is clearly the most enlightened one by default. Why actually look at the sociological implications of actions when you can just sneer at any alternatives without thinking about them because someone’s tricked you into thinking that ‘nice’ means ‘stupid’?”

“I’m sorry, you think you’re being nice?” I asked. “You’re destroying humanity’s future so you can get your ‘look how friendly we are respecting other cultures’ fix and you think this is nice?”

“‘Humanity’ and ‘the people in charge of the Empire’ are not – ” Mom began, but Dad cut her off.

“When do we get to see that future?” he asked.

“What?”

“Well, in your great-grandmother’s day, when the Empire was being created, they probably would have looked at what we have now, nodded and said, ‘ah yes, this is about as good as it’s going to get,’ and stopped this whole system around the time you reached adulthood. Your children would be the last caretakers of the still-extant ageing slaves, and by the time they were having children, the Empire would largely be free. Do you see that happening?”

I frowned. “No, it’s too early. There’s still so much crime and unrest, and weaknesses in our species, and other nations that could be a threat to our borders. Their estimations were off.”

“When do you think this perfect future for humanity will be reached, then?”

I stared. That was a monumentally stupid question. “When we have peace and unification,” I said slowly, trying to figure out what they weren’t understanding. “All of humanity will have access to the Empire’s benefits, weaknesses will be weeded out to the point where people stop failing the competence tests, and future generations will be smart, responsible and emotionally stable.”

“And what’s the Empire’s exit strategy when that happens?” Mom asked. “Are the higher-ups going to check the numbers one day, announce ‘okay, we’ve reached our targets,’ and… just stop arresting and enslaving people? What happens to all the slaves?”

I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. There’s no need to do anything.” They’d learned this in school like I had, right? Could they honestly be this stupid? This wasn’t a complicated topic. “People will stop failing the competence tests, because they’ll be more competent. Without war or enslavement, the number of orphans will drop; combined with a more responsible and smarter populace, crime will disappear on its own. After the last slaves eventually pass on, everyone will be free and strong and ready to tackle the world together. We’re already doing everything right. Nothing needs to change. Bad people will vanish over time in our system and only good people will remain.” I frowned again. This was a kindergarten topic. My parents were trained scientists. It shouldn’t be hard for them.

“And in this future world, who works in the factories?” Mom asked. “Who cleans out the Clinic and cooks our meals, or the meals of other citizens? Who cleans the streets or works in mines or farms or garbage sorting facilities?”

“We’d hire people,” I said impatiently. “Some people do just hire employees, you know. Everyone could afford it because there’d be more resources to go around with stronger, smarter, more responsible people to allocate them and nobody inferior leeching them.”

“And that’s a transition that you expect to happen? People voluntarily agreeing to spend their money hiring other citizens for jobs nobody wants to do?”

“Generally,” Dad added in the patient tone of somebody explaining a complicated concept to a small child, “when people have found a cheap and efficient way to do something, they fight tooth and nail to keep that system. Especially rich people. The people who own the big factories and farms are the people who support those who make the decisions. Did you know that the minimum intelligence requirement went up in the competency tests last year?”

“I heard about it,” I said stiffly.

“Why would they do that? They didn’t need to do that.”

“A smarter population is better,” I pointed out.

“True. But you said that the Empire doesn’t need an ‘exit strategy’ for reaching a perfect, peaceful future; that things will level off on their own when people stop failing the competency tests. Except that they _keep changing the tests_. When I said that your great-grandmother’s generation would have found the current day to be their glorious future, I meant that we’ve already met all their initial goals. They wanted to protect the Empire’s borders by unifying the continent we were on, and had competency goals set at levels that ninety eight per cent of people alive today would pass – I had a friend look up the public access competency records of a bunch of people and check. Both September and October would be free citizens under the initial goals.”

“September is deaf,” I pointed out.

“Deafness was allowed if the testee was considered capable of learning a sign language. I’m sure you’ve seen her use one.”

I didn’t reply. Secret slave languages – ‘slave cants’ – were technically illegal, but September did occasionally communicate with other slaves using hand signals. We usually turned a blind eye since forcing her to read lips and sound everything out took ten times longer; speaking was a sign of basic respect when talking to us, but we had no reason to care if slaves showed basic respect to each other.

“Every time too many people start reaching a goal,” Dad continued after a moment, “they change it. They need enough slaves to fill the factories, armies and mines. This means changing the standards of acceptable, over and over again, while their own competency results remain suspiciously locked. A perfect future isn’t a goal, Cassie; it’s an excuse. It’s a mirage designed to control you – oh, yes, things are terrible, but it’s the fault of this foreigner, that rebel, the diabetic over there, not us. Yes, we need you to do some horrible, evil things, but it’s all in service of this grand future that’ll take place after you die, so your cruelty is enlightened charity, and anybody who objects is nearsighted and selfish. We’re not selfish, though; we’re doing this for your own good, for humanity’s own good, and the fact that it’s better for us just means that we’re better than you, through nobody’s fault. It’s the natural order of things. We want what’s best for everyone, so anyone who disagrees is an enemy of humanity itself.”

“You can make anything sound absurd with enough baseless rhetoric,” I snapped. “You can’t just make up a bunch of stuff about the Empire being evil and call it an argument.”

“What part of what I’ve said was made up?” Dad asked. “I can get my friend’s research on the ability scores by tomorrow if you want to see it.”

“Just because you’re dumb enough to be convinced by your traitor ‘friend’ doesn’t mean I am!” I snapped. “No wonder the Empire thinks people like us are naturally radical if you go around thinking like this!”

“People who are restricted from basic privileges like driving for years because everyone knows how ‘emotionally unstable’ we are, who are encouraged to sign up for combat military positions because everyone knows how ‘strong and pain-tolerant’ we are, and who seem to mysteriously die in hospitals and prison cells a lot more than white people do are ‘naturally radical’,” Dad said, raising his eyebrows. “Weird, that.”

“The whole system was honestly ridiculous from the start,” Mom muttered. “It’s all Purist nonsense rehashed under new words to look more enlightened.”

“Uh, no it isn’t,” I said. “The Purists always spout some nonsense about a master race being better than everyone. What we have is a meritocracy.”

“What we have is Purism, by a more circuitous route,” Mom said. “We want smart, strong humanity, right? So anyone who isn’t strong or smart enough, or who is otherwise deficient, gets removed from the breeding pool and had their name taken away and gets shuffled into factory or service or military work where they can otherwise contribute to the future of humanity. Only the best remain. And when those standards are met, we raise them; we want people to be even stronger, even smarter. We add basic skills; they must be able to learn to read and write by a certain age, they must not be ‘socially or emotionally unstable’, they must pass these new memory and perception tests, they must not be carrying this new inherited disease we just learned to test for. And we make those guidelines more and more stringent as people meet them, making humanity better and better.”

“As we should!” I said.

“Cassie, you work in environmental protection. You know the importance of diversity in a robust ecosystem; you know that we’re constantly finding valuable resources in things that were once considered completely worthless. You’ve been with us while we’ve had to explain this, over and over, to administrators and politicians and groups of schoolchildren. So tell me, in this great meritocratic, Diversitist society of ours… what diversity are we preserving in humanity? Do you think that you and Melissa having different coloured skin is a testament to a diverse society? You’re building a future where everyone is the same – everyone is the best at everything that the higher ups deem important, and everything they don’t deem important is eliminated. What counts as the ‘best’ and ‘important’ is a standard that becomes narrower and narrower, because we need a certain number of slaves to sustain the way our economy is built, and the acceptable range of human traits and skills becomes narrower and narrower. What this Empire’s nonsense rhetoric is aimed at is not a glorious, peaceful, happy future for humanity. It is a humanity that will perfect itself out of existence.”

I shook my head. “You can make any system sound untenable if you push it to absurd extremes,” I said. “Things won’t get that far.”

“Of course they won’t. The Empire will fracture under its own weight first, which raises the question: what’s all this pain and misery for?”

“The Empire won’t fracture unless extremist fearmongers like you kill it,” I snapped.

“If it won’t fracture,” Dad said, “and it won’t reach a dangerously extreme level, what’s the exit strategy? When is enough enough? When is the Empire going to step back and say, ‘this is a good future for humanity?’ Those are the only three logical options – either it collapses, or it doesn’t and things keep escalating until humanity is less diverse than even a Purist’s grandest dreams, or we stop raising our standards whenever they’re met. If there’s no exit strategy, us ‘extremist fearmongers’ are humanity’s only option.”

I glanced from Mom to Dad. They both watched me impassively. “You’ve rehearsed this, haven’t you?” I asked, suspicion dawning. “You have! You’re trying to recruit me! How long have you been planning this?”

“We’re not,” Dad said. “Honestly, we never wanted you to find out. We wanted to protect you.”

“Protect me?! You could protect me by not being treasonous criminals! How long has this been going on? Has everything you’ve ever taught me been part of… part of some long game to corrupt me? All that stuff about the importance of diversity in stable systems and how we should protect parts of nature that don’t have known value yet and… it’s all been part of this radical nonsense, hasn’t it?”

“No!” Dad said, scooting forward to take my hand; I pulled it away. “No, this is all still… recent.”

“Do you remember that time when you were kept failing to hit anything in marksmanship at Youth Group, and there was talk that your eyesight might be failing?” Mom asked.

I stared. “Are you saying this is _my_ fault? For not being able to hit a target?”

“No,” Dad said. “Compass, it’s – ”

“Don’t call me that!” I snarled. “Don’t ever call me that, ever again!” My father’s term of endearment toward me was a fairly common one for a parent to give a child. A compass was a piece of military equipment used to help soldiers distinguish directions if they got turned around; something they could look at, and it would show them the way. Like most kids, I’d always been proud of being that kind of inspiration for my parents, but not if the way I’d shown them was this one.

“You didn’t do anything,” Mom said. “But that scare, the possibility that they might blacklist you long after we thought we were in the clear, after you’d passed all the tests years ago… that kind of shook up our perspective.”

“We suddenly had to plan for a new possible future,” Dad said. “For what we were going to do if they decided that your vision didn’t match up to standard.”

“For if you were suddenly a childless couple,” I said, nodding. Childless citizens tended to be frowned upon, selfishly hoarding their own good characteristics from humanity’s future. At the very least, they were expected to adopt from an orphanage; many who did so simply adopted young and pretended the relationship was biological.

“No, that was never an option,” Mom said.

“For as long as there’s breath in your body, we’ll never be childless,” Dad agreed, nodding. “We had friends who knew our concerns, who took the risk of linking us with certain… people who could help, if necessary.”

“We were ready to sell the farm to get enough money for the journey,” Mom added. “Arranging that secretly was a bit tricky, and people weren’t happy when we pulled out.”

“Selling the farm would put the Conservation Zone at risk, depending who bought it,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“We’re not the only environmentalists in the Empire,” Mom said, waving a hand dismissively. “If your father didn’t run the Center, somebody else would.”

“But the possibility of needing to get you out wasn’t the whole story,” Dad said. “I mean, you turned out to be fine. Most of what struck us was how _unfair_ it all was. Why did it matter that your eyesight was good enough to hit a target? You weren’t going to war.”

“You need to see for other reasons,” I pointed out. “Even stuff like reading or driving – ”

“You could read fine,” Mom said. “You read every day in school. You could track animals and spot them at a useful distance. So we couldn’t help wondering, why was your citizenship, your entire future, the very level of basic rights the Empire was willing to recognise for you, dependent on whether you could pass some arbitrary vision standard that wasn’t going to apply to your life?”

“And even if it did, a pair of lenses in front of your eyes would have fixed the problem,” Dad shrugged. “Were they really that worried about the possibility that you might someday have a child that might also need to put a lens in front of their eyes, that they were willing to completely destroy the future of an innocent, dutiful girl with an important career lined up? None of it seemed to make very much practical sense.”

“We looked into what the various ability thresholds were, to see what standard your sight was going to be tested against, and I was struck by how arbitrary a lot of the levels seemed,” Mom added. “They don’t make sense biologically, sociologically, or practically. It’s like somebody just stuck a bell curve over a bunch of variable traits without thinking about it. I was ranting to your father about it, about how inefficient it was and how somebody competent should be setting these benchmarks to get good, useful results, and he just looked right at me and said...” she met Dad’s eyes.

“‘What benchmarks would be appropriate?’” Dad smiled.

She nodded. “Exactly. And that became a sort of hobby, an intellectual exercise; I was expecting to get a paper out of it at some point. But the more we looked into it, the more calculations we ran, the more it became clear that such benchmarks didn’t exist; the whole system was unworkable from the start. There are just too many human variables for which there isn’t a clear ‘better’ along enough cases, especially not one with enough of a difference to build a system of enforcement around. And even in the cases where there is a definite ‘better’, taking away the freedoms of those who don’t meet the benchmark just creates more problems than it solves. The Empire’s ideology works only as that – an ideology, that can be used to justify a powerful minority forcibly extracting resources from the rest of the humanity we supposedly serve. It can be made to sound just logical and clever enough that people think it makes sense, but there’s no real scientific rigor or deep thought behind it. Certainly not enough to justify killing foreign families and stealing their children, or forcing people into work camps based on their running speed and tonal perception, or taking away a competent and honorable girl’s future if she fails a meaningless visual acuity test.”

“So you thought things went a bit too far with me,” I conceded. “The Empire might seem a bit overzealous because the rules have to apply to everyone, there’s no room for case-by-case stuff since that just leads to corruption and favouritism. But if I had been someone who was actually useless – ”

“Would you believe,” Mom said brightly, “that I’ve met people who failed fitness tests you aren’t even aware exist, because they’re so basic… and yet, I’ve never met a single useless person in my life? The idea that we can gauge the ‘usefulness’ of a human based on some arbitrary productivity and competence markers _is the exact problem_. I’m not saying the markers are wrong. I went into this thinking the markers are wrong. I’m saying that the real infection in this society is the very perception that those markers should even exist, no matter where we put them. Look at it this way, Cassie – you want to build a future where everyone is strong and compassionate and peaceful and intelligent and living in harmony, yes? That’s what the Empire is supposed to be, and we’re just waiting to complete the steps of filtering out the traits that aren’t up to scratch, yes?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“Then why, if that’s the goal, do we have a society where the first thought that’s supposed to occur to us when we see another person in trouble isn’t ‘a fellow human being, whom I love, is in trouble!’, but ‘what is that particular person worth?’ How do you expect to build a perfect future for all humanity when your definition of what parts of humanity are worth caring for is so limited? Do you think society will magically readjust its priorities once everyone still alive is valuable enough to count, and then everyone will be magically equal and free?”

I recognised the tricks they were using. No matter what they said about me not being meant to find out, this obviously was rehearsed, and it was propaganda 101; they were working as a team, throwing a mixture of facts, lies and poor rhetoric at me too fast for me to parse it, let alone rebut every point. It might have worked on a weaker mind, but rational thought took time, deliberation, careful fact finding and analysis, and I knew a bad basis for reason when I saw one. As a rationalist, I’d be obligated to verify their findings about ability score changes and so forth later, maybe even check to make sure I really knew what places like Brazil were like if I could find a safe way to do so. But I wasn’t obligated to stand there and drown under rhetoric and pretend that their ability to spout fancy words at an unprepared audience made them right. Traitors were good at propaganda; it was how they converted radicals. Just because my parents could sound good didn’t make them good people.

“I’m going out,” I said sharply.

Then I turned and left.

I was going to be late.


	8. Chapter 8

“You’re late,” Jake admonished me as I landed at the rendezvous point and started to demorph.

<Family problems,> I said.

“Anything we need to worry about?” Marco asked.

<No.>

“Okay.” Jake looked around at our little band – himself, myself, Marco, Ax. (I always felt outnumbered, somehow, when Melissa wasn’t around. I wasn’t sure why; maybe it was because we were the only girls on the team. Maybe it was because Jake and Marco didn’t like me very much.) “We fly into the orphanage, get small, have Cassie lead us to the Kandrona, get big, destroy it. Problems: we’re on a time limit. If it’s not assembled yet, it’s going to be in the next couple of days, because if there are controller orphans in there then there has to be a working Yeerk Pool there within the next couple of days. Also, getting underground without being seen is going to be tricky, since Melissa can’t make it.” He shot me a look. “You really should acquire her.”

“And what, copy all of her ID cards?” I asked. “Carry them as we fly in a little pouch? You know if any of us get caught with forged or stolen ID cards, even if Melissa says it’s okay...” I drew my thumb across my throat.

<If we were to acquire small insects, we could – >

“Ax, for the last time, we are not ever, ever turning into bugs,” Marco said, looking revolted. “I’d rather die at the hands of a gross slug than be one.”

“It’s beneath human dignity,” Jake agreed, wrinkling his nose.

“And I’m not convinced it’d be safe,” I said. “Everyone knows that bug brains are basically nothing. How would we think in one?”

<The same way you think as a kitten,> Ax said, puzzled. <Your mind forms an anchor through – >

“I’m sure that hocus-pocus works great for aliens, but it’s never been tested on a human brain,” I said. “And frankly, I’d rather befriend a yeerk than lose my mind into zero-space and get trapped as a caterpillar or something.” I shuddered.

“Any questions?” Jake asked.

“You mean aside from the gaping holes in this plan about how we’re supposed to conceal ourselves and so forth?” Marco asked.

“Yes, aside from those.”

“Nope. I’m good. I bet this won’t end in our horrible deaths at all.”

“Then let’s go.”

We flew out in silence. I couldn’t help think of my parents, back at home. What were they doing at that moment? Packing up to run off into the forest with their traitor friends? Waiting nervously at home, unsure if the police were about to show up and arrest them? Police that I should have called the second I’d gotten out of that dangerous house. Police that any decent citizen of the Empire would have called.

But I hadn’t.

Was I a traitor now? I didn’t feel or think any different. I gave more to the future of humanity than most, what with all the yeerk fighting. Two days ago, if I’d hugged my parents and said goodnight and went off to bed, I’d have been a perfectly dutiful Empire girl. If I did it tonight, I was a traitor.

I probably wasn’t going to hug my parents when I got home. But I hadn’t picked up the phone either, and I knew I wouldn’t. No matter how much I despised them at that moment, no matter how appalling their actions were and how horrifying their anti-Empire rhetoric was, they were my parents, and I loved them.

If I hadn’t made the call, and didn’t intend to make the call, that could only mean that I loved them more than I loved humanity. Jake’s not-so-secret suspicions had been right about me all along – I was radical, deep in my bones, no matter what I did to try to make up for it. If I wasn’t, if I was someone who deserved to be part of the Empire, then I would’ve turned my parents in. My lack of action was the proof.

Oh, I could make all kinds of excuses. I could say that the war against the yeerks was too important, and I couldn’t be distracted by a handful of escaped slaves who would probably get themselves incompetently killed before they could cause any trouble anyway. I could say that packing my parents off for reeducation would get them infested and I couldn’t afford to deal with the risk of having controllers in the house. I could say that the risk of me getting blacklisted, and having to escape an orphanage and live on the run or something (quite possibly with other runaways who didn’t have a good reason like being a footsoldier in an alien conflict) would cause a lot more problems than my parents’ half-hearted little rebellions could – it’s not like my parents were capable of causing any real damage to the Empire. All of those things were true… but even if they weren’t, I still wouldn’t make that call. I’d still put a frivolous emotional connection to two vets above the entire future of the human race.

The orphanage was almost in view. <Hey, Ax?> I asked privately.

<Yes?>

<Out in the forest, do you ever see humans? Other than my parents, I mean.>

<Occasionally. I am well-concealed from them, however.>

<What kinds of humans?>

<Tired and injured ones, usually. Many of them are young.>

<And you didn’t think to tell us?>

<You did not ask until now. Are they relevant to the yeerk fight?>

<They’re enemies of humanity.>

<Oh. They tend to look quite weak and frightened, for enemies.>

<Alright,> Jake said, cutting off our conversation, <there’s the orphanage. Let’s get in and get this over with.>

<I think we should go in through the guard office,> Marco said. <The other building is probably locked up, but if we can knock out some guards and steal their uniforms, we’ll have an easier time. At least until the guards wake up.>

<Ax, fly down and see how many guards are in the guard office.>

<Yes, Supreme Leader.> He dropped down and fluttered around the building. <There are three guards inside and two patrol towers with a line of sight to the outer side of the building. But they cannot see the inner side or the door.>

<Can you eliminate the threat without raising an alarm?>

<Yes, Prince – >

<What did I tell you about alien titles?>

<Sorry, Supreme Leader. I can eliminate the threat.>

<Do it.>

Ax demorphed. He neatly chopped through the part of the door where the lock’s shaft would be, pushed it open and, after about half a seconds’ worth of thumping and surprised shouts, gave the all-clear. We headed inside and started to demorph.

<Ax, guard the door,> Jake said. <Everyone else, pick a guard.> He himself had hopped over to the guard captain and started to demorph; I picked a skinny, middle-aged woman, leaving Marco with the grumpy-looking muscular man in the corner. All three of them were out cold, of course.

We were morphed and halfway through stripping our targets when Ax reported, <Somebody is approaching.> He stood flat against the wall, one single stalk eye peering out a window. <Two people. Young guard, approximately your age, and somebody else, not in a guard uniform.>

“Who are they?”

<I do not know.>

“Well, describe them!”

<They have a bag over their head.>


	9. Chapter 9

Marco and I had frozen, watching Jake, waiting for orders. He thought fast.

“Ax, get small. Everyone else, shove your guards under the table.” He started to drag his own over.

“We’re half-dressed!” I hissed, trying to shove mine into the limited space under the tablecloth. There was a knock on the door.

“Then keep dressing! Marco, check the big locker, I bet you’ll find some badly hidden alcohol or something.”

Marco did so, leaving Jake and me to drag his guard on top of ours. Ax was shrinking rapidly. There was another, more insistent knock.

“Come in!” Jake called, while Marco rummaged for illegal liquor, a half-sized Ax dove for cover under the TV stand, and I tried to tug the tablecloth over an errant foot in a natural-looking way.

The door was pushed open. I recognised the young guard who had spoken to Melissa at the gate on our first visit. His right hand held a taser against the side of the girl who was with him, ready to strike – this wasn’t hard, as she was several inches taller than him, dressed in the mishmash of discordantly fashionable clothes characteristic of Clearview orphans. The bag over her head obscured her identity, but her features were roughly visible as it had been pulled back fairly tight against her skin, being held at the base of her neck by his left balled fist. She seemed to be struggling to breathe a bit against the fabric. Her hands were cuffed securely behind her back.

“I caught this one sneaking around and spying, again. I’m telling you, she’s just way too much trouble to have around,” he said, pushing her forward against the table. As she grunted in pain, I moved to secure the tablecloth before it could slip and reveal the unconscious guards. The prisoner dropped to the floor with a weak groan. The guard looked around. “Are you guys having a party?”

“That’s none of your business, Mr...” Jake’s eyes found the boy’s nametag, “Jackson. But maybe you’ll be invited along when you’re a bit older, yeah?” He winked.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. What should I do with...” he nodded at the girl he’d brought.

“Leave her here,” Jake said. “We’ll deal with it.”

“But protocol says – ”

“Look. David.” Jake put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, trying to look fatherly. “This could be a pretty complicated situation. I can’t explain, but it’s very… messy. And it’s better if a kid like you weren’t involved, okay?”

“Fair enough, but I have to write up the incident to – ”

The girl on the floor moved.

One second, she was a limp, crumpled heap. The next, she’d twisted to throw the bag free from her head, rolled her feet under her, and stood up. I recognised a couple of things at once – first, her face. She was the girl I’d run into underground. Second, her movements. Her stance was the same as the fighting stance she’d taken underground, and didn’t seem to be hindered much by the lack of free hands. The third thing I recognised was a vague sense of impending disaster crystallising in my gut, and the reason for this was because as she rolled to her feet, she pulled the tablecloth to the floor.

The young guard stared at the guards under the table. He glanced between us, taking in our half-dressed morphs. Understanding dawned.

“Andalites!” he hissed.

The girl kicked him in the throat and ran for the door.

The guard raised his taser, but I was already knocking it out of his hand. I grabbed his head in both hands and slammed it against the stone floor, hoping I’d gotten the angle right. Knocking people out was an imprecise science and I was nowhere near as good at it as Ax was, but it must have worked, because the he went instantly limp. Meanwhile, Marco had grabbed the girl, and had her on the ground with his knee in the small of her back. Ax, a cobra, had draped himself over the doorhandle to prevent any further attempts to leave.

And Jake had frozen. He stared at the girl, his mouth open, his skin pale. He looked about to faint.

<Um, Jake?> I asked.

“Rachel?” he asked.

The girl glared up at him. “Who the hell are you? You’re _not_ O’Grady.”

“Who the hell is she?” Marco asked.

“She’s nobody,” Jake snapped. To the girl, he said, “You’ll sit tight there and keep quiet if you know what’s good for you. We have an important mission and you’re not going to screw everything up again.”

She just sneered. “Oh no, is one little orphan getting too inconvenient for your big master plan, you weirdo?” She glanced at the bodies under the table. “What are you?”

“That’s none of your – ”

“Oh come on, we all know you’re just going to kill me anyway, right? Or do whatever you did to Gracie and Mick.”

“You’re not a controller, are you?” I asked. “He was. But you’re not.”

“What’s a controller?” she asked.

Somewhere distant, a dog was barking. Had somebody raised some kind of alarm? We needed to hurry.

As if struck by the same thought, Jake straightened up and looked to Marco and me. “Finish getting dressed,” he said. “We need to get this done and get out, especially if they come looking for him.” He nodded at the kid I’d knocked out.

“I think we should call it off,” Marco said as I got to work pocketing my guard’s various tools. “If they come looking for him while we’re down there, they’ll see all this and we could get trapped underground. Boom, game over.”

“If we leave now, we’ll never get another chance at this,” I said, doing up my belt. Marco, settling a gun into his holster, was looking over the unconscious bodies, and I knew what he was thinking – the guards were probably all controllers, enemies. The girl was just going to grow up to be a slave. Our presence was going to be noticed after we left anyway, so we should just execute the lot of them so they wouldn’t wake up mid-mission. He glanced at Jake, who nodded.

“It’d be neatest for Ax to bite them,” Jake said.

<We are… certain that these are all controllers, Supreme Jake?> Ax asked, sounding uncomfortable.

“If they got the kid, they definitely got the rest,” Jake said. I picked up Ax and carried him over to the table, dropping him onto a random guard’s leg.

“What’s a cont – ”

“Shut up,” Jake snarled.

“I was only trying to help. Enemy of my enemy and all that. You’re here to stop those creepy guards, right? How they’re… changing people?”

“Changing people?” I asked. “When you say they’re changing people, do you mean – ”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jake said. “If we’re ready, we should kill the guards and go. Do you remember where the Kandrona is?”

“I don’t know. I should be able to find it.”

“I know where it is,” the girl said.

“I swear by the sun, Rachel, if you don’t shut the hell up, I will tase you unconscious. Haven’t you ruined enough lives, Raech?”

“Raech?” her eyes widened. “Wait a minute. Jake?” He looked away, and she laughed. “Wow. It really is you, isn’t it? What are you doing here? Also, what the hell kind of disguise is that, and _how_?”

“Who the hell are you?” Marco asked.

“She’s not – ”

“Oh come on, Jayjay.” The girl’s grin became vindictive. “I know you’re too busy to ever visit, but you’re not going to introduce your friends to your cousin?”

“Cousin?” Marco asked, frowning.

“We have a mission right now,” Jake snapped. As if to highlight his point, the dog barked again, louder.

“Oh, well, don’t let me get in your way,” Rachel snapped. “You never have before.”

“Never have – do you have any idea, _any idea_ , what you did you the rest of us?! Do you think they just left us all alone? Me, Tom, Jordan, Sara, all the adults, they tested us all over again! Sara was just a little baby and they did her health tests three times, all because you had to be a fucking defective! She was a baby and you killed her mother!”

“Hang on a second,’ Marco cut in. “Your Aunt Naomi died fighting in Brazil. She’s a war hero.”

“My mother was a hero,” Rachel said acidly, “but she didn’t die in some foreign country. Your precious Empire executed her for trying to protect me.”

“They killed her because she was a traitor,” Jake said, “because you twisted her mind and turned her into one. If you had never been born, Aunt Naomi would be alive, and Jordan and Sara would have a mom, and my dad wouldn’t have nearly lost his job because his rebel sister showed that there was radical weakness in our bloodline. Tom and I wouldn’t have been dropped out of the A class in Youth Group and my brother wouldn’t have an alien parasite in his fucking head. All because you had to be a parasite on our Empire instead of doing what any self-respecting person should have done and killing yourself as soon as you found out what you really were.”

“I found out the same time you did, when the tests came back,” Rachel said quietly.

Jake crossed his arms. “And yet you’re still alive. Seems to be working out great for you. Nice job.”

“Girl,” I said. “I mean, uh… Rachel. You said something about people coming back from somewhere different?”

She nodded. “Gracie and Mick. I knew something would happen eventually, I guess, but I thought it would be...” she swallowed, and blinked back tears. “Whatever these guards are doing, it’s evil. It changed them.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“The guards don’t like us. At all. Things haven’t gone well since the escape attempt.”

“Escape attempt?” Marco asked.

Rachel nodded. “There used to be five of us. We were very close, and we decided to make a break for it together. People try to escape sometimes, but they almost never succeed. Yet we managed to get Tobias and Sandra out, and they were never caught.” She grinned. “The guards didn’t like us making fools of them, so they were rather more… watchful, after that. I’m sure we all would have ended up lobotomised if we weren’t too young, but as it was, they couldn’t do much but put us in the cells or the chair any time they thought we might step out of line. A couple of weeks ago Gracie lost a shoe, and they accused her of hoarding tools for another escape attempt and dragged her downstairs. Mick and I stayed up and prepared to treat her injuries, but when she came back, she was...” Rachel shrugged. “She was fine. We thought she’d been lobotomised at first, but she hadn’t. She was just very happy, very focused and very obedient. She stopped hanging out with us, stopped having any real interest in anything. She did her work, did her studies, and did very little else.”

“A model slave,” Marco murmured.

“Maybe. Mick and I started investigating. A couple of others were behaving the same way, so we figured that it was some new control technique, you know? They’d go off with the guards at weird times, but other than that they didn’t really… do anything except follow schedules and seem vaguely happy about everything. I guess someone must have noticed us investigating, because a couple of days ago the guards came into class and took Mick away, and when he came back he was like them. I’ve been trying to find out what I could before they do it to me, too; I found the thing they were calling the Kandrona, started following some of the guards. Until he found me.” She nodded at the guard I’d knocked out.

“And he brought you here?” I asked. She nodded.

“The timeline doesn’t make sense,” Marco said. “If this Gracie has been a controller for a week and the Kandrona wasn’t assembled yesterday, how is the yeerk feeding? The guards could go into town, but the orphans...”

<I do not wish to interrupt,> Ax cut in politely, <but is destruction of the Kandrona still our mission objective?>

“Yes,” Jake said. “Marco, uncuff Rachel; she’s going to show us the way. Ax, are those guards all dead yet?”

<Only this last one to go,> Ax said, crawling off the pile of bodies under the table and over to the one I’d knocked out. He crawled onto his leg, opened his mouth…

And the guard’s eyes flew open. He kicked sharply, flinging Ax through the air, while simultaneously drawing his gun. Marco, heading over to Rachel, looked around to see what was happening and immediately got a face-full of startled Ax who, true to cobra instincts, buried his fangs in Marco’s cheek. I drew my own gun, but the guard was already aiming at me, firing.

Two gunshots. One from Jake, hitting the guard in the back. The other from the guard, making my chest feel suddenly very heavy. I dropped my weapon and raised my hands to my breastbone; they were immediately covered in blood. Breathing somehow seemed like a complicated, multi-step process.

The guard rolled to his feet; clearly, Jake’s shot hadn’t severed his spine. Jake aimed again, as did the guard; _bang, bang_. Jake’s knee. The guard’s shoulder.

Marco was still prying Ax from his face, but Rachel darted forward and leapt, wrapping her legs around the guard’s neck and dragging him to the ground. Gun in his right hand, he was still trying to get a clear shot on Jake, but his left held his taser which he jammed against her back. The air crackled with electricity. Jake had dropped his gun when he’d been shot; it had skidded over to the pile of bodies under the table, on the other side of Rachel and the guard. Breathing wasn’t the only thing that seemed too complicated for me; even walking had become difficult, somehow. Raising my own gun was impossible. I stumbled forward. Someone was barking.

Marco was free from Ax’s fangs; he flung him at the guard and charged afterward, roaring. I should probably demorph and heal, if I could remember what I looked like. Rachel wasn’t moving; the room smelled like cooking meat. Jake crawled forward, looking for his gun. The window shattered.

Through the window, barking, roaring, snarling, flew a huge black doberman – Tobias. His jaws closed on the hand holding the taser with a crack of metal and bone. The guard screamed, and Tobias raised his bloody jaws with a couple of fingers peeking out between his teeth. Rachel took a deep, shuddering breath. I stumbled forward, only to be knocked over by Marco, onto Rachel’s legs. Jake grabbed Marco’s gun from his holster.

A sudden, strange chill passed through me, and we were, for a moment, nowhere.

“Finally!” a voice I didn’t recognise echoed with a cackle. “How hard is it to get you all to touch each other? Did you really have to take so long to go about it?”

“Leave, Drode,” a second, far more familiar voice said. “This is no place for you.”

“I have every right to – ” the first protested.

“LEAVE!”

There was a cessation of… a presence. The world came back.

And for a moment, I was two people.

I was Cassie, and I was Cassie. Two sets of memories, perspectives and worldviews swam through my head, dizzyingly mismatched; nothing made sense in relation to anything else. But in my mind were fifteen years’ worth of Cassie, American animal-lover who worked at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic, and only a couple of days’ worth of Cassie, dutiful child of the Empire who worked at the Wildlife Stability Center, and within moments, sheer volume had won out.

I opened my eyes. I was uninjured, in my own body, in my morphing outfit. There was grass under my hands and knees, and a starry sky above. Sitting not far away was Rachel, face unscarred, hair somehow looking stylish even when tangled, one hand on Tobias’ feathered back. Behind her stood Ax, an andalite once more and looking terrified, all four eyes watchful. On my opposite side knelt David, teeth gritted, palms pushed against his eyes. Jake stood, although he looked about ready to fall over; pale and shaking, he was staring at Rachel. Marco stood next to him, endeavouring to appear as if he’d just chosen to stand very close to Jake and wasn’t helping him stay upright. He was unmoving except his eyes, which skipped rapidly from Animorph to Animorph. He looked kind of zoned out, like he was trying to solve a really difficult puzzle.

And in the middle of the group stood a not-quite-human old man, bowed with age, supporting himself with an ornate staff and dressed in a robe. His long whispy beard was snowy white, his skin glowed blue from pointed eartips to long toes, and his eyes were voids broken only by stars.

<Hey, quick question, nothing too important,> Tobias said brightly, <but what the ever-loving fuck is going on?>


End file.
